Wherefore Oblomovshchina: The Relationship Between Geography and National Identity in Four Seminal Novels of Russian Literature

The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters

Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:37945087

Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Wherefore Oblomovshchina: The Relationship Between Geography and National Identity in Four

Seminal Novels of Russian Literature

Alexandra Hanson

A Thesis in the Field of Foreign Literature, Language & Culture

for the Degree of Master of Liberal Arts in Extension Studies

Harvard University

May 2018 Copyright 2018 Alexandra Hanson Abstract

Russian writers played a key role in the initiation of national conversations about the country’s geography and identity in the early part of the nineteenth century. This study examines one particular component of Russian national identity—the trait of oblomovshchina—and its relationship to geography as presented through the voices of four famous Russian authors in novels written over a span of 150 years. Through the lens of literature, this study addresses the following questions: How is the geography of

Russia depicted in novels by Russian authors? How do Russian authors portray oblomovshchina? In what ways do the authors connect oblomovshchina and landscape in their works? How do these depictions change with the passage of time?

The literary representation of Russia’s geography, especially in terms of landscape and weather, leaves no doubt that geography is partially culpable for the prevalence of oblomovshchina in many Russian people. The discussion about Russian national identity remains a topic of interest in the post-Soviet Russian Federation, and

Russia’s literary voices continue to be involved and thoughtfully contribute to the dialogue. Frontispiece

iv

Acknowledgments

Спасибо большое to my dad for starting me down the Russian path so many years ago. Because of our time in Moscow during middle school, I chose to study

Russian in undergrad, which aligned the stars during my semester abroad for the catalyst conversation with my host family that ultimately inspired this thesis.

Thank you to my mom for your intuitive understanding of what it takes to accomplish a project like this: hours of undisturbed quiet. You kept me well-stocked with tea and snacks so that I could stay locked in the basement for as long as I needed. I especially appreciate the ultimatum you laid down on my friends to stop inviting me out to do things—they wouldn’t take my ‘no’ for an answer, but they listened to yours!

To the myriad family members and friends who feigned interest in Russian literature and my thesis process and let me babble on about it for hours—thank you.

Every time I answered the “What’s your thesis about?” question, my argument became clearer. You helped me to write and rewrite this entire paper in my head long before I started typing.

Thank you to Sarah Powell for suggesting, before I even wrote my proposal, that

Professor John R. Stilgoe might be the perfect advisor for my topic. And a million thanks to Professor Stilgoe, who was indeed the perfect advisor. I am very grateful that you chose to guide me through this process.

Mwenzie—you were there at the beginning. In my heart, you are still here at the end.

v

Table of Contents

Frontispiece ...... iv

Acknowledgments...... v

Background ...... 1

Chapter I. Dead Souls ...... 12

Chapter II. The Golovlyov Family ...... 23

Chapter III. Cement ...... 36

Chapter IV. Farewell to Matyora ...... 50

Conclusion ...... 59

Bibliography ...... 62

vi

Background

As Winston Churchill once pointed out, Russia is an enigma. The West is consistently befuddled by Russia, but Russia is a mystery to her own people as well.

Russians seem to be interminably in the midst of an identity crisis. Are they European or

Asian? Do they embrace Western ideals or Eastern philosophy? Is religion important to them or is it a relic of their past? Are they vanguards of scientific and industrial progress or are they an underdeveloped, ‘backward’ nation? Do they work hard or are they lazy?

Are they stone-faced stoics or an emotive, friendly populace? What exactly is it that makes them Russian?

For centuries, Russians have struggled to define themselves and their country with characteristics that they can embrace as wholly Russian rather than reflections of or comparisons to their neighboring cultural powerhouses. In the nineteenth century, this national conversation gained significant traction—a time marked by debates and discussions among scholars, artists, philosophers, and other educated Russians that resulted in the identification and embrace of a unique Russian national landscape, as well as the development of a broadly accepted Russian national identity. Even today, these two topics remain deeply intertwined in the Russian consciousness.

The sheer physical size of Russia, the tremendously broad scope of people encompassed therein, and the inherent subjectivity of the topic make it virtually impossible to scientifically and conclusively define THE Russian national identity. As

Ely points out, national identity is “a process, the attempt to limit and shape the collective imagination, rather than a fixed phenomenon that can be limited and defined” (14).

However, some motifs regularly appear in the ongoing discussion and debate. A common characteristic presented as central to the Russian national identity is a mindset marked by fatalism, “the typical Russian toska (melancholy),” “indolence and sluggishness,” “Russian lethargy” (Olgin 42, Fedotov 15, Ragsdale 125). Baring notes,

“The first thing that strikes the English reader of Russian literature, is the unrelieved gloom, the unmitigated pessimism of the characters . . . Everything is gray, everybody is depressed; the atmosphere is one of hopeless melancholy” (26). A 2009 study interviewing individuals from six neighboring countries of Russia to learn how the

‘typical’ Russian is perceived in those places concludes that “Russians are often depicted as lazy and lacking conscientiousness” (Realo 246). This characteristic is poshlost, a

“word for the complacent and the trivial” (Gifford 43). Fedotov’s “pure image of the

Russian” is of “profound calm, taciturnity . . . even apathy . . . a strain of fatalism . . . He is likely to come to a grim and tragic end” (Fedotov 6, 11). The stereotypical Russian has an “infinite capacity for sitting still and doing nothing . . . the vast mountain weight of inertia of the whole Russian people” (Johnston 727, 733). Krizhanich comments that

Russians “don’t want to help themselves till they are forced to . . . they have no pride or spirit or sense of personal worth” (qtd. in Pares 212). This pessimism, inertia, passivity, melancholy, lethargy, etcetera clearly prove difficult to designate in a single word, but is a critical and common component in Russian national identity and sense of self.

In the nineteenth century, this motif of national identity appeared in Russian literature in the form of the ‘superfluous man.’ These characters, brought to life by well- known writers such as Alexander Pushkin, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ivan Turgenev, and other well-known writers are marked by their inability to take action, affect change, or attribute

2

significance to their lives. They are known for “words, words, and no actions,” the best men of Russian society but “condemned to inactivity and—words” (Kropotkin 97-98).

One of Dostoevsky’s themes is “men who have been brought so low by the circumstances of their lives that they have not even a conception of there being a possibility to rise above these conditions” (Kropotkin 165). Turgenev too uses his works to show “the sense of lives of deprivation and stoicism in the face of death” of ordinary Russians

(Todd 244). In Russia during Turgenev’s life there was “a lot of flinging-oneself-down- on-one’s-bed-without-undressing-and-sinking-into-a-heavy-slumber stuff,” which inspired Turgenev’s creation of Rudin, a man who spends all his energy “in passionate streams of idealistic babble . . . [he is] a busybody incapable of action” (Nabokov 65-66).

The ‘superfluous man,’ exemplified by “Onegin, Pechorin, Beltov and Rudin,” reached a new level of significance with the introduction of Oblomov in 1859 (Harjan 289).

Oblomov, like other superfluous men, thinks, dreams, and plans, but proves utterly incapable of actually taking action. Ivan Goncharov’s novel tells the “story of how good-natured and indolent Oblomov lies and sleeps, and of how neither friendship nor love can awaken and make him get up” (Matlaw 140). The literary critic N.A.

Dobroliubov draws a comparison between Oblomov and Onegin, but points out that

“never has [the type] been presented to us so simply and naturally as he is in Goncharov’s novel . . . this is our native national type” (Matlaw 140). In his famous critique of the novel written shortly after its publication, Dobroliubov states that Oblomov’s life

“reflects Russian life; in it there appears before us the living contemporary Russian type presented with relentless severity and truth; it reflects the new word of our social development, pronounced clearly and firmly . . . in full consciousness of the truth. This

3

word is—oblomovshchina; it is the key to the riddle of any of the phenomena of Russian life” (Matlaw 140). Dobroliubov defines the term that became “an enduring and fascinating catchword for Russians” (Gillespie 86). Kropotkin writes, “At the time of the appearance of this novel, [oblomovshchina] became a current word to designate the state of Russia. All Russian life, all Russian history bears traces of the malady—that laziness of mind and heart, that right to laziness proclaimed, as a virtue, that conservatism and inertia, that contempt of feverish activity” (159). The novel was a sensation in Russia because “everyone recognized something of himself in Oblomov, felt the disease of

Oblomov in his own veins” (159). According to Olgin, “Russians speak of Oblomov as of a man they know personally” because “he represented a trait of character so well known and so common in Russia that nearly every Russian recognized himself or his friends in the hero of the novel” (74). Goncharov distilled the “national disease of inertia” into a single portrait that received widespread acknowledgement (Figes 410).

Like many Russian words, oblomovshchina defies one-for-one translation to

English. However, descriptions by both Russians and foreigners attempting to explain it align neatly with the words and concepts previously discussed. It is “a complete paralysis of will and a complete amorphousness of desire” (Harjan 286). Kropotkin says it is “the supreme poetry of laziness . . . the ‘let me alone’ attitude, the absence of attitude, the want of ‘aggressive’ virtue, non-resistance and passive submission” (155-

159). It is a name for the “‘do-nothing’ spirit that characterized all of Russian society”

(Gillespie 88). Oblomovshchina “reflects the attitude of so many Russians who believe that individual intervention in current events is useless” (Slonim 187). ‘Inertia’ is a term frequently associated with these explanations: Dobroliubov describes it as “utter inertness

4

resulting from apathy toward everything that goes on in the world” (Matlaw 141); Olgin uses phrases like “lack of will” and “inertia incarnate” (73); Lindstrom defines it as “an endemically Russian disease” with symptoms of “chronic inertia, intellectual torpor, failing initiative, and lack of know-how” (145).

There are, of course, dissenting opinions about this characteristic of Russian national identity. Kropotkin summarizes both sides himself: at one point, he writes that oblomovshchina “is thoroughly Russian, so Russian indeed that only a Russian can fully appreciate it,” but he qualifies that “it is at the same time universally human” (152). He goes on to articulate, “It exists on both continents and in all latitudes” (161). Fedotov also believes that it is a “stupendous misunderstanding” to focus on the ‘superfluous man’ as a “basic trend of Russian life” (9). He points out that there is another type—

“the one that retained the strong will . . . who built the Empire, who fought its wars and made its laws, who sowed the seeds of enlightenment” (9). Voices such as these serve to remind that any description of a national identity or national character is a generalization that does not represent every single person within said nation. At the same time, researchers generally agree, “in most cases [stereotypes] exaggerate some personality characteristic that [does] in fact exist,” and stereotypes do “in general, have a ‘kernel of truth’” (Realo 230).

Oblomovshchina may not exist in all Russians, but it is certainly common in discussion about Russia’s national identity. What circumstances enabled the development of this mindset in the Russian people? The explanations distill into four main categories—religion, serfdom, autocracy, and geography.

5

Christianity, and Russian Orthodoxy in particular, have been a critical centerpiece of the development of Russia and its people for more than five centuries. Pares writes,

“Orthodoxy was itself the major part of Russian civilization, and has perhaps done more than anything else to shape the distinctive Russian consciousness” (5). According to

Ragsdale, “there is in Russian Orthodoxy a large element of fatalistic resignation” (xiv).

He notes the “nonresistance” for which the first Russian saints are revered, and describes how spiritual edification in Russian orthodoxy is based on “innocent suffering” rather than “moral striving or . . . service to the faithful” (39). In other words, the mindset instilled by Russian Orthodoxy is one of passive acceptance of the circumstances. It is because of this submissive mindset, accepting of whatever comes without the notion that sometimes it can be influenced to the betterment of the situation, that Ragsdale comments, “It has been suggested that the selection of a religion was one of the great tragedies of Russian history” (10). If spiritual edification comes from suffering, then one should embrace it rather than try to find a way to reduce or end the suffering. Every event is credited to ‘God’s will.’ As Kavelin explains, “. . . he may complain about his fate, or he may thank God for it, but he accepts good and evil without so much as a thought that one might be able to attract the former or fight against and defeat the latter.

Everything in his life is given, predetermined, preestablished” (qtd. in Rancour-Laferriere

69-70).

The serf system, established in the seventeenth century by Tsar Ivan Grozny, essentially made slaves of the vast Russian peasant population by tying it directly to the land so that it became the property of the landowner. Serfdom “encouraged the degradation of the defenseless peasant population as well as the dissipation of the

6

pampered gentry beneficiaries of the corrupt bargain” (Ragsdale 25). Many Russian proverbs trace back to this system with references to bowing, submission, groveling, and lowering designed “to teach the peasant a sense of absolute submissiveness before authority” (Rancour-Laferriere 13). Gentry and nobility did not have to lift a finger for anything; as Ragsdale notes, “the nobility was a parasite class. It lived on the serf labor of its peasants and it provided nothing in exchange” (124). In turn, the peasants’ “status of inferiority [and] . . . passive acceptance of that status” meant they had no motivation to strive for anything beyond the bare minimum required for survival (Ragsdale 149).

Lindstrom bluntly states that oblomovshchina is “induced by the evils of serfdom” (145).

Ragsdale notes that, “Oblomov is the symbol of . . . the spoiling to which serfdom had led the Russian gentry” (125). Kropotkin argues that oblomovshchina is “a sad result of serfdom,” although he goes on to say that “as we live further away from serfdom times, we begin to realize that Oblomov is not dead amongst us; that serfdom is not the only thing which creates this type of men” (159).

From the principality of Rus in the seventeenth century to imperialism in the nineteenth century through Communism in the twentieth century to the pseudo- democracy of modern times, a powerful central government or ruler “jealously protective of its own authority” has dominated Russia (Ely 23). In Imperial Russia, the government aggressively opposed attempts to introduce new ideas and reforms, and when “the

European-educated students of Russia encountered the reaction of the state to their aspirations for their country, they quailed before the prospect” (Ragsdale 129).

Kropotkin believes that Turgenev’s ‘superfluous man’ Rudin represents an 1840s Russian

“developed under the conditions which prevailed under Nicholas I, when there was no

7

possibility whatever for a thinking man to apply his energy, unless he chose to become an obedient functionary of an autocratic, slave-creating State” (97). Under Communism, the peasants “described ‘collectivization’ as robbery and eternal slavery” (Ragsdale 217).

Pares also highlights the incapacitation of the intelligentsia, “deprived of the opportunity of directly applying its ideas . . . a contrast between thought and action which only heightened the strained consciousness” (7). Although the form of government changed over the centuries, the Russian population has consistently been cowed under the will of its powerful national leadership.

Russia’s territory historically included prosperous areas, such as what is now the country of Ukraine. But over time, and with the rise of the influence of Muscovy,

Russia’s center moved north into “an environment so much less hospitable to civilization than the salubrious south” (Ragsdale 13). Ragsdale argues that it was very much the move north that precipitated many of Russia’s problems because “agricultural conditions in the north were infinitely inferior to those in the south . . . the growing season was shorter. The soil was poorer. The trees had to be cleared before the ground was cultivated” (14). Sufficient precipitation for successful agriculture was also a problem farther north, which is another of the “curses of the Russian land. Because of the vast territorial expanses and the fact that the only large sea within meteorological reach of continental Russia is the Arctic, there is an inverse relationship between the length of the growing season and the quantity of precipitation: the longer the growing season the scanter the rainfall” (14). Pares notes the thin topsoil that cannot sustain crops, the barren areas near the Caspian Sea, and the “poor clay soil” in the north that supports thick forests stunted by the winds and temperatures of the Arctic (31). Russia’s “mountain

8

ranges are all, or nearly all, on the circumference” of the territory, which means there are no natural obstacles to impede the wind, “nothing to bring down a large rainfall from the winds which come from the ocean,” and “nothing to break the advance of the Arctic climate” (29). The extreme temperatures, lack of precipitation, shortness of growing season, infertility of soil, and monotony of topography indicate that successful agricultural development is difficult to achieve, which in turn means that obtaining food—the basic requirement for sustainable life—is a perpetual challenge. In terms of oblomovshchina, Pares argues that the severe climate forces the majority of the Russian population into “prolonged intervals when [they] sink into lethargy and musing” while they are confined to their dwellings to survive the long winters (76).

In the late nineteenth century, a theory proposing that geography is the primary influence on cultural development gained credence among international geographers and sociologists. The impact of environment on the development of human societies has been a field of study since Hippocrates, but in the nineteenth century, this theory—geographic determinism—was regarded as “all-essential” to social causation (Thomas 5). Prominent figures such as geographer Ellsworth Huntington argued repeatedly that “the climate . . . is really Russia’s worst enemy” and directly ascribed Russian characteristics of

“passivity, dreaminess, lack of initiative” to “the long, cold, monotonous, workless winters” (Russia’s Worst Enemy 36-39). In a productivity study comparing a variety of countries including New Zealand, Australia, Argentina, the United States, Japan,

Germany, France, Estonia, Poland, China, India, and Russia, Huntington noted that

Russia regularly rated lower than the other countries in the study: lower agricultural production per person, lower industrial production per person, low quality of individual

9

diet, etcetera. Again, he tied it to the “cold winters and short and often droughty summers” (Geography of Human Productivity 19). Historian Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu also made “the sweeping generalization that Russia’s national character . . . [was] a product of the harsh climate and monotonous terrain” (Ely 17). According to these proponents of geographical determinism, environmental influence proved the explanation for why oblomovshchina was such a prevalent characteristic of Russian society.

However, it is important to note that over the rest of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, the focus on the influence of environment became less accepted as a stand- alone causality. This shift in academic opinion did not debunk Huntington’s theories, but it did emphasize that the influence of the environment “is only one of several influences affecting social activity,” which aligns with our discussion above (Thomas 301).

For Russian identity, geography has long featured an outsized role. Both Nivat and Ely agree that landscape ultimately became so significant in the Russian mind that it

“constituted a founding myth of Russian national identity” (Ely 20). The country, with

“its vast, level plains . . . its cold and difficult environment” was celebrated for its “very lack of picturesque scenery” (7). The “cult of Russian space” became an origin story, a mirror for current events (“a torrent of snow . . . as an image of the storm of revolution”), and a reinvention of the “Slavophile myth of the opposition between surface poverty and hidden abundance” (Nivat 51, 66, 53).

Embrace of the national landscape was largely a result of the efforts of Russia’s artistic and literary community as Russian writers and poets consistently returned to the impoverished, immense, untamed swathes of steppe and taiga as symbols of true

Russianness, drawing a close connection between character and land as a way to define

10

‘true Russian nature.’ The most famous of Russian poets, Alexander Pushkin, made the initial foray into “a new idealization of Russian terrain that made the landscape interesting and admirable to Russian readers,” which influential contemporaries such as

Nikolai Gogol solidified into “one of the foundations of Russia’s national identity” (Ely

79, 20). This relationship between literary voices and national identity is what “makes

Russian literature a valuable object of study not only as art, but also as the surest road to the understanding of the Russian people and the Russian condition” (Olgin v). It is in their literature that Russians “go down to the very bottom of everyday existence,” so it is to their literature that we turn to examine the conversation about national identity. The four novels we analyze span approximately 150 years of Russian history. Nikolai

Gogol’s Dead Souls is the oldest novel published in 1842. Mikhail Saltykov finished The

Golovlyov Family four decades later in 1880. Fyodor Gladkov’s Cement was published in 1925, followed fifty years later by Valentin Rasputin’s Farewell to Matyora in 1976.

The breadth of time between these seminal works enables our thorough examination of the longevity of the literary discussion about oblomovshchina as a component of national identity and its relationship with Russia’s geography.

11

Chapter I.

Dead Souls

Nikolai Gogol, whose most significant works were written and published in the

1830s and 1840s, was one of the pioneers who led the transition from “an insistence on the picturesque quality [or lack thereof] of the Russian landscape” in favor of “a new aesthetic vision” that was “wholly and distinctly Russian” (Ely 90-91). Gogol enjoyed classically picturesque scenery, and during an extended stay in Europe, he commented frequently on the quaint houses, majestic mountains, and verdant orchards, all of which were more enjoyable because they were “nowhere to be found in the vast expanse of our

Russia” (qtd. in Ely 97). But he also became inured to that scenery over time, and eventually wrote, “Mountains, mountains, mountains. I am so sick and tired of them that if at this moment, I came across some mean, flat Russian landscape with a log cabin and grey skies, I’d admire its appearance as something new” (qtd. in Magarshack 152).

While Gogol felt that Russia lacked “conventional picturesqueness,” he ultimately rejected “picturesque imagery as a suitable approach to Russian landscape description” and instead “came to see Russian space as entirely original; its very lack of conventional beauty became for him a sign of Russia’s promise as a nation” (Ely 91). In his famous novel Dead Souls, he asks rhetorically, “Why depict the poverty of our life and our melancholy imperfection, digging people out from the wilds, from the most secluded corners of the empire?” (Gogol 255). Of course, this is exactly what he does throughout the course of the novel because he believed that Russian people and their actual lives

should be portrayed realistically. His exploration of landscape in Dead Souls transformed the “interpretation of Russian landscape” into one that embraced the vastness, the dreariness, and the monotony as features of which to be proud because they were unique to Russia.

It must be noted that Gogol was born in Ukraine and devoted his early works to portraying Ukrainian natural settings. However, he spent most of his life post-childhood in either Russia or Europe, and hailing from a time when the political situation between the two countries was not as fraught as it is today, he is widely acknowledged and beloved as a Russian author. His literary authority in Russia is not diminished in any way by the technicality of his birth place. Gogol’s own words reveal the depth of his connection to Russia, as when he wrote to a friend about the “unbreakable chain” binding him to “my own land, to our poor and dismal world” (qtd. in Ely 98). Although he felt there was an “absence of beautiful landscape in Russia,” Gogol nevertheless “never abandoned his powerful attachment to Russia” (Ely 98).

One famous passage in Dead Souls emphasizes both the lack of traditional picturesqueness of the Russian landscape and Gogol’s perspective that the landscape instead represents “freedom and open space” which are “a fundamental trope of Russia’s national self-image” (115). Gogol begins by emphasizing everything Russia lacks in comparison to Europe’s geographic splendor:

It is poor, neglected and comfortless in thee, no insolent marvels of nature crowned by insolents marvels of art, no towns with many-windowed lofty palaces piled in precipitous heights, no picturesque trees, no ivy-clad houses in the road and everlasting spray of waterfalls rejoice the eye or strike awe into the heart; the head is not turned to gaze at the rocks piled up on the heights above it; no everlasting lines of shining mountains rising into the silvery pure skies gleam in the distance through dark arches, scattered one upon the other in a tangle of vines, ivy, and wild roses

13

beyond number. (223)

Having clearly outlined what Russia is missing, Gogol then briefly describes what Russia possesses. The pithiness alone of this description highlights the difference between

Russian and European landscapes: “In thee all is open, desolate, flat; thy lowly towns lie scattered like dots, like specks unseen among thy plains; there is nothing to allure or captivate the eye” (223).

Initially, Gogol’s description seems to be entirely negative, focusing on monotony and dreariness, but the questions that follow hint at the idea that there is something powerful in those vast spaces: “But what mysterious inexplicable forces draws one to thee? Why does the mournful song that floats all over the length and breadth of thee from sea to sea echo unceasingly in the ear? . . . What is the mysterious hidden bond between us?” (223). In the final section of the passage, Gogol introduces his belief that the unbounded horizons of Russia equate to the unbounded potential of the Russian people, although there is still a degree of ominous danger inherent to the concept. He writes:

. . . already a threatening cloud, heavy with coming rain, looms above my head, and thought is numb before thy vast expanse. What does that immense expanse foretell? Is it not here, is it not in thee that limitless thought will arise, since thou art thyself without limit? . . . Is it not here there should be giants where there is space for them to develop and move freely. And thy mighty expanse enfolds me menacingly, with fearful force reflected in the depths of me; with supernatural power light dawns upon my eyes . . . Ah, marvelous, radiant horizons of which the earth knows nothing! Russia! (224)

The extensive travel across Russia undertaken by Dead Souls’ lead character,

Tchitchikov, affords Gogol many opportunities to explore ways of bringing the Russian countryside to life. He does so in the spirit of clear-eyed reality instead of fanciful

14

perfection. Tchitchikov endures rain that seems “as though it would go on for hours” so that “The dust lying on the high-road was soon churned into mud and it seemed harder every minute for the horses to draw the chaise” (40). Even on “a very fine day, the ground was so thick with mud that the chaise wheels, flinging it up, were soon thickly coated and that made the carriage considerably heavier. Moreover, the soil was of exceptionally sticky clay” (59). Even in rare moments of exaggerated poetry (“My God, how glorious at times is the long, long road! How often have I, drowning and perishing, clutched at thee, and always thou hast rescued and preserved me!”), Gogol continues to present a realistic picture of the Russian countryside, with “fields and plains before one; nothing to be seen, it is all deserted and open. A milestone with a number on it flies into sight; daybreak is near; on the cold whitening horizon there is a pale streak of gold; the wind grows colder and harsher; one pulls one’s coat more closely round one!” (225).

However, not every description of the landscape highlights the challenges and difficulties it so frequently imposes upon its denizens. When Gogol brings his focus away from the endless horizon and closer at hand to a single component of an estate, he discovers that

Russia also possesses classic features of natural beauty. For example, on the approach to one country estate, Tchitchikov passes “at first through an oak copse, then by cornfields just beginning to turn green in the midst of the freshly ploughed land, then along the edge of the hillside from which fresh views over the distant plain came into sight every minute, and finally by a wide avenue of spreading lime-trees . . .” (286). On another estate,

Tchitchikov observes an overgrown garden whose “picturesque wildness was the only beautiful thing in the place,” with the “interlacing tops of the unpruned trees” in “clouds of greenery,” the “colossal white trunk of a birch-tree . . . stood up like a round shining

15

marble column,” and a hop vine dangling from the birch and other trees with “its festoons of delicate clinging tendrils faintly stirring in the breeze” (113-114). The grand scale of the countryside poses a challenge, which Gogol embraces, but he is able to highlight the smaller details as well.

While his overarching intent was to reinvent Russia’s approach to her geography,

Gogol also meant for Dead Souls to capture every minute detail of Russian provincial life, which means he portrays the “everyday rural scene” with a “seemingly interminable collection of mundane sights,” using language that multiplies “to infinite monotony the profoundly unremarkable features of his countryside” (Ely 113). Gogol does not want to represent a Russia that on paper differs in any way from reality. The feature town of the novel is “in no way inferior to other provincial towns: the yellow paint on the brick houses was extremely glaring, while the wood houses were a modest dark grey. The houses were of one story, of two stories, and of one and a half stories with the everlasting mezzanine which provincial architects think so beautiful” (Gogol 9). Gogol describes the

shop signboards with bread-rings or boots on them, almost effaced by the rain, with here and there a picture of blue trousers and the name of some tailor; in one place as a shop with caps . . . in another place there was depicted a billiard table with two players in dress coats such as are worn in our theaters . . . Here and there, tables covered with nuts, soap, and cakes that looked like soap, stood simply in the street; and here and there was an eating-house with a fat fish and a fork stuck in it on the signboard. (9)

Gogol’s focus on portraying reality also means he regularly touches on the prevalence of oblomovshchina among the provincial inhabitants:

All the sluggards and lazybones who had been for years lounging at home in dressing-gowns abusing the shoemaker for making their boots too narrow, or the tailor or the drunken coachman, crept out of their holes; all who had dropped all their acquaintances years ago and whose only friends, to use the popular expression, were Mr. Slugabed and Mr. Sleepyhead . . . all those who could not have been lured out of their houses even by an

16

invitation to taste a fish soup costing five hundred roubles, with sturgeon six feet long, and all sorts of fish-pasties which melted in the mouth, turned out now; in fact it seemed as though the town were busy and important and very well populated. (193)

Gogol implies that the town on a normal day appears deserted and lifeless, and it is the exceptional circumstances precipitated by the main character, Tchitchikov, that finally prompts the many oblomovshchina-inflicted residents to re-enter the world.

Gogol believed that “upon the nature of the land depends the way of life and even the character of its people” (qtd. in Magarshack 97). In Dead Souls, the people are “at the roots of their characters so many responses to the void that surrounds, invades, and threatens to supplant them” (Adams 55-56). Tchitchikov’s journey around Russia prompts him to interact with a variety of provincial landowners, and almost every one suffers in varying degrees from oblomovshchina. Tchitchikov first encounters the village of Manilovka, described as a place to which “Few people would have been attracted”

(Gogol 21). The manor house is on a hill “exposed to every wind that might chance to blow” (21). The pond is “covered with green scum” and “Nowhere was there a growing tree or any kind of greenery among [the huts] to relieve the monotony of the grey logs”

(21). With such a landscape around him, it is not surprising then that the owner of the place, Manilov, is presented as a man who “for the most part confined himself to meditation and thought” (23). Gogol emphasizes that “It could not be said that [Manilov] busied himself in looking after his land, he never even drove out into the fields” (23). He had ideas for schemes to improve his estate, such as building a bridge over the pond, but

“All these projects ended in nothing but words” (24). Manilov tries to argue that country living is isolating, and that “One grows too rustic if one stays shut up for ever” (27). He says “country and solitude would have many charms” if it included neighbors “with

17

whom one could to some extent converse on polished and refined subjects, pursue some sort of study that would stir the soul,” but his statement reveals that his interest remains in words and thoughts rather than activity. An interaction with Manilov, Gogol writes, left one with an impression “of a deadly boredom” (23).

Plyushkin is another landowner with whom Tchitchikov interacts whose estate leaves the first impression of a “dead place” where “everything looked dejected” (114-

115). Plyushkin was a wealthy and effective manager of his estate earlier in his life, but when his wife died, “the keys and with them the petty cares of housekeeping passed into his hands” and thus began the degradation of his standard of living and his mental faculties (119). (This motif of degradation appears again with horrifying results in The

Golovlyov Family.) Plyushkin became more miserly as time passed, and more isolated from the world around him. The house provides a physical reflection of these changes as

“Every year more windows were boarded up” (120). Over the years, “the important part of the management passed more out of his sight” and eventually “he had himself forgotten how much he had of anything and only remembered the place in the cupboard where he had put a decanter with a little of some liqueur in it” (120). Through all of this,

Plyushkin’s serfs continue to pay their rent and his storehouses continue to be stocked with crops and products that simply pile up to rot. It is clear that the land has potential, and that the hard work of the serfs produces results, but the weak character of the landlord that succumbs to inaction leads to the decay of the estate while Plyushkin becomes “a mere tatter of humanity” (121).

Yet another man of inaction is the landowner Tyentyetnikov, who is “neither good nor bad in his life and actions—he simply vegetated” (257). A detailed description

18

of his day culminates with Tyentyetnikov spending two hours before dinner in his study doing his serious work, which

consisted in thinking over a work which had been continually thought over for a long time past. This work was to deal with all Russia from every point of view . . . to solve the difficult questions and problems that beset her, and define clearly her great future . . . But so far it had not got beyond the stage of meditation. (258)

Tyentyetnikov is a reincarnation of Goncharov’s Oblomov, or, as Gogol describes, a member of “that class of people, numerous in Russia, who are known as idlers, sluggards, lazy-bones, and so on” (258). Tyentyetnikov embodies the paradox of the Russian countryside, which is in some cases “a haven of freedom, fostering thought and meditation and the one career of useful activity” and in others enforces isolation that results in a slow, painful mental and physical decline (266). For individuals inclined towards the torpor of oblomovshchina, the latter tends to be the result, and so it is with

Tyentyetnikov. He “got into his dressing-gown for good, abandoning his body to inactivity and his mind to meditation upon a work on Russia,” and his “days came and went, uniform and monotonous” (270). Tyentyetnikov is aware of his dulled state of existence, and periodically “a quiet secret melancholy crept over his heart, and a quiet dumbly-sorrowful aching regret at his own inactivity rose up in spite of himself” (271).

Yet he does nothing to alter the life that “seemed to him hateful and loathsome” (271).

He is a perfect representation of oblomovshchina.

Towards the end of the novel, Tchitchikov meets Hlobuev, a failed landowner from whom he ultimately purchases an estate. Gogol describes the estate with a vocabulary of sleepiness or boredom. The peasants are not the only people yawning:

“Yawning was visible in the buildings and in everything” (337). Someone directly calls

19

out Hlobuev’s oblomovshchina by asking, “How it is you are not taking steps to extricate yourself from such a position?” (333). Hlobuev replies with his own question, “What steps could I take?” (333). He is fully aware that he has neglected his estate and put himself in his deplorable position: “I don’t know how to do anything: I am no use for anything . . . I feel most sorry for my poor peasants, I feel that I am incapable . . .” (335).

Hlobuev speaks of himself but presents Gogol’s opinion on the widespread existence of oblomovshchina in Russia:

It sometimes seems to me that the Russian is a lost man. He has no strength of will, no courage to persevere. One wants to do everything and one can do nothing, one is always thinking that from to-morrow one will begin a new life, that from to-morrow one will set to work as one ought . . . but not a bit of it, on the evening of that very day one will over-eat oneself, so that one can only blink one’s eyes and can’t say a word—yes really; and it’s always like that. (336)

As Hlobuev specifies, this malady is not unique to one strata of Russian society. He says,

“every one is like that among us, the gentry and the peasants, the cultured and the uncultured” (337). Later in the novel, in another moment of introspection, Hlobuev says:

. . . all capacity for action is dead in me. I cannot see that I can be of any service to any one in the world. I feel that I am an absolutely useless log. In old days when I was younger I used to think it was all a question of money, that if I had had hundreds of thousands, I might have made hundreds of people happy . . . But now I see that that too is vanity, and that there is not much sense in it. . . I am good for nothing, absolutely nothing, I tell you. I am not fit for any sort of work. (360)

Of all the landowners Tchitchikov encounters in the course of the novel, Hlobuev is the most cognizant of his shortcomings as a result of his proclivity towards oblomovshchina, but he remains incapable of improving the situation through his own volition.

To contrast with the landowners who succumb to oblomovshchina, Gogol includes one among the cast of characters that embodies the opposite traits.

20

Skudronzhoglo’s philosophy is to work. He tells Tchitchikov, “Where agriculture is the basis of the social structure, there is abundance and plenty. There is neither poverty nor luxury, but there is plenty” because the main thing is to work, whether that work is done

“for me, for yourself, or for a neighbor” (323). He says, “I can’t endure idleness” (323).

He advises Tchitchikov, “You must have a love for the work: without that you can do nothing . . . and believe me it is anything but dull. They have got up an idea that it is depressing in the country . . . but I should die if I had to spend one day in town . . . A farmer has no time to be bored. There is no emptiness in his life, it is all fullness” (325).

Skudronzhoglo represents the extreme opposite end of the spectrum from the majority of the characters with their varying tendencies towards oblomovshchina. He also highlights how the pattern of the seasons, and the weather that comes along with each, fits into the active rhythm of life—an important theme for Valentin Rasputin in Farewell to Matyora also. He says that work “truly does elevate the spirit” because “In it a man goes hand in hand with nature, with the seasons of the year, and is in touch and in sympathy with everything that is done in creation” (326). Even in winter, when people are forced indoors by the “snows and floods,” there are specific activities to be accomplished in preparation for the spring, and then the pattern moves through sowing, mowing, harvest, and threshing (326). Skudronzhoglo’s enthusiasm contrasts sharply with the listless characters previously discussed, as he concludes feelingly, “Why, you couldn’t find anything so delightful in the whole world!” (327). He is the exception in Dead Souls, as there are exceptions elsewhere amongst the Russian people. However, the repetition of oblomovshchina among his characters makes clear Gogol’s belief that the Hlobuevs and

Plyushkins of the world are far more prevalent.

21

Gogol presents his thoughts on the Russian character largely through the individuals that people his novel, but occasionally uses his narrator to wax philosophic as well. For example, when broadly describing the townspeople, Gogol as narrator writes,

“Some were the sort of men who need a kick to make them rise to anything; others were simply sluggards lying all their lives on one side, as the saying is, and it would have been a waste of time to lift them up, they wouldn’t have stood up under any circumstances”

(159). Another time, he laments:

Where is the man who can utter that all-powerful word ‘Forward,’ in the language of our Russian soul, who knowing all the strength and quality and all the depth of our nature can, with one wonder-working gesture, spur the Russian on to the higher life? . . . But centuries after centuries pass by; half a million sluggards and idlers lie plunged in unwaking slumber, and rarely is the man born in Russia that can utter that all-powerful word. (271)

Gogol passionately believed that the full potential of both Russia and her people had never been fully realized, and part of his mission as a writer was to bring awareness to that plight and energize the next generations to undertake the transformation.

Dead Souls was a landmark novel for the unveiling of a uniquely Russian landscape, embraced with all its harshness and vastness. Portrayal of the landscape was critically important to Gogol, as was opening his contemporaries’ eyes to the true, unfortunate state of their national character, and he accomplished both tasks through the characters and settings of Dead Souls. While his narrator largely focuses on the geography and oblomovshchina as distinct topics, Gogol uses the thoughts and opinions of his characters to identify the link between the two. This connection is even more apparent in the next novel of this study: Saltykov’s The Golovlyov Family.

22

Chapter II.

The Golovlyov Family

The Golovlyov Family is Mikhail Saltykov’s most famous work, and one of the gloomiest in Russian literature. As a satirist, many consider Saltykov a successor of

Gogol, and The Golovlyov Family, written approximately 40 years later, a work that

“takes us back to the world of Dead Souls” (Foote 54). Goncharov’s Oblomov is another significant work in the “genealogy of The Golovlyov Family” (Proffer qtd. in intro xxiii).

As part of the literary tradition commenting on the cultural traits of the Russian gentry and life in the countryside, “a dying social order” according to Ehre, Saltykov presents his conviction that environmental determinism plays a role in the development of personal identity and characterization (8). The specific segment of Russian society under scathing portrayal is this novel is the gentry, or, as Proffer explains, “a slave society with a slave mentality” where “hardly anyone has a real job or profession” (qtd. in intro xxvi).

“Having been undermined by generations of idleness,” the main characters of The

Golovlyov Family embody the worst aspects of oblomovshchina and Saltykov makes it clear that the geography of the family’s estates is partly to blame (Foote 55).

The family estates of Golovlyovo, Dubrovina, and Pogorelka provide the backdrop for the novel. The remoteness of the estates exemplifies the typical Russian societal structure of the time, one that the landowner Plyushkin complained about in

Dead Souls too, which “isolates men in provincial enclaves cut off from intercourse with the larger world” (Ehre 13). Manor houses stood alone among miles of agricultural

acreage infrequently dotted with the impoverished dwellings of the resident serfs. The silence of the countryside—“a silence in which the straining ear could distinguish a welter of sounds”—is emphasized by “. . . a howling sound; then it seemed as though someone was walking along the corridor . . . a mouse was scratching behind the wallpaper” (Saltykov 91). These small noises highlight the solitude and isolation, even inside the security of the manor house, where “silence descended, bringing fear with it”

(91). The vast spaces and lack of human proximity cause the Golovlyovs to find

“something burdensome and depressing in a sleepless night in the country” (91). Even so, the masters of the estate avoid interaction outside the boundaries of their property, and reinforce this when “the main gates leading to the house and the main porch had been solidly nailed up with the onslaught of fall, forcing the servants to communicate with the outside world by way of the maids’ entrance and the side gates” (126). The peasants want to participate in life beyond Golovlyovo, but the gentry stick their heads in the sand, as it were, and ignore everything outside the realm of their petty control.

In this self-sustaining, insulated dominion, Ehre points out of “even nature has conspired against” the inhabitants (13). Golovlyovo is a place where the overwhelmingly dominant images “are of darkness and death” (7). As Foote remarks, “The seasons, whatever the time of year, are unfriendly” (58). There is the “unending gloom of autumn,” the “white shroud” of winter, and the “spring sleet . . . neither rain nor snow”

(Saltykov 41, 99, 155). Winter brings “a sharp, cold wind” that “whipped up the snow and in a single instant would pile up snowdrifts and cover everything that fell in its path and the entire region was filled with wailing” (99). The weather forces everyone to take refuge indoors for preservation of life, let alone for mere comfort. The funeral theme

24

occurs again with the “snowy shroud as far as the eye could see” that causes everything to grow numb and silent (216). The challenges of spring include unpredictable, rapidly changing weather that swings from sleet shower to “a strong wind blowing from the south, promising a thaw” in mere moments, and roads covered with “puddles which foretold of fields of soaking snow” (155). At Golovlyovo “. . . the trees stood naked, even the new grass had not yet appeared. In the distance could be seen the black fields which were mottled here and there with white patches of snow lingering on in the depressions and hollows. The road was nothing but black mud and glistening puddles . . .

An utter desolation reigned . . .” (196).

The most prevalent season in The Golovlyov Family is autumn, a time when everything looks “gloomy, drowsy, everything exuded an oppressiveness” (41). The clouds roll in and obscure everything:

Beginning in the morning, when the light barely began to glimmer, the entire horizon would be thickly covered with clouds. The clouds stood there as though frozen, bewitched. An hour would pass, then another and a third, but they would still be standing in the same places . . . the rain was pouring out of it, pouring out of it in such a fashion that a darker, almost black, streak stood out more distinctly against the dark background of the sky’s horizon. Farther on was another cloud which . . . hung suspended like an enormous shaggy clump over the neighboring village of Naglovka and seemed as though it were threatening to crush it . . . Clouds, nothing but clouds and more clouds, that’s the way it was all day long. (41)

With such oppression hovering constantly overhead, it is not surprising that when “the long, dreary autumn evenings set in,” the residents of Golovlyovo are condemned “to a fatalistic idleness” (87). Autumn the following year is described again with terms that bring to mind depression and lethargy:

Outside a fine rain was drizzling incessantly. The earth grew sodden. The trees stood drearily, dropping their yellowed leaves onto the ground. Outside, near the servants’ quarters, an undisturbed silence reigned as

25

well. The servants were huddled up in their corners, partially because of the gloomy weather . . . The rain, ceaselessly pattering against the windows . . . induced a drowsiness . . . (205-206)

Even summer, usually welcomed with its long hours of sunlight and warmth, is an oppression in the world of the Golovlyovs. Saltykov describes a hot summer day at

Dubrovina:

. . . it was as though all life had ceased . . . Even the trees stood there subdued and motionless, seemingly in anguish . . . The heat descended from above in a scorching wave. The earth, covered with short scorched grass, was aflame. The implacable light oppressed the area with a golden haze so that it became difficult to distinguish objects . . . Everything was submerged in the shimmering haze. All odors, from the fragrance of the blossoming lindens to the stench of the barnyard, hovered in the air like a dense cloud. There was not a sound. (49)

Like winter, summer forces idleness upon the estate’s denizens because of the extreme conditions of the climate. Rather than being a time of growth and plenty, it is a destructive season, “mercilessly scorching the endless fields” (25).

How does this place, with its severe weather and uninspiring landscape, influence the people to whom it is home? To varying degrees, each of the main characters feels inexorably drawn to Golovlyovo, but also trapped by it. Proffer highlights how “the estate exerts its fatal attraction” over the members of the Golovlyov family, portrayed through three generations in the novel (qtd. in intro xxxi). Arina Petrovna, matriarch of the Golovlyov family, represents the oldest generation. In the beginning of the novel, she is an active woman who dedicates all her energy to expanding the holdings of her family’s estate, but she diminishes rapidly when she becomes a dependent of her sons.

Removed from her position of power, and the responsibilities that went along with it, she begins “a series of somber days devoted to enforced idleness” (58). Her submission to oblomovshchina aligns with a seasonal change, as “The long, dreary, autumn evenings set

26

in condemning one to fatalistic idleness” (87). The aging woman feels restless, and is

“beset by anxiety and yearning, but she could do nothing” (87). Her plight is similar to several of Gogol’s landowners in Dead Souls, with days full of “a drowsy idleness” that rapidly turn her from “a strong and self-contained woman whom no one would have dared to even call an old woman” into “a wreck for whom neither the past nor the future existed, but only the next moment which had to be lived through” (89). Her life becomes marked by “helpless loneliness and bleak idleness,” which quickly leads to her physical deterioration as well because “a life of idleness offered no resistance” to that decline (89).

Arina Petrovna’s decline is directly related to her relocation from the main estate of

Golovlyovo to Pogorelka, the estate granted to her orphaned twin granddaughters. Arina

Petrovna cannot break herself out of the “depressing monotony which was so abundant in country living” and the “miserable estate” on which she is living (89). Although

Golovlyovo is no Eden, Pogorelka is in decidedly worse condition,

a bump on a log, there was no garden, no shade, no sign whatsoever of any comfort . . . The house was single-storied, as though crushed . . . In the rear, a few outbuildings were situated and these too had fallen into decrepitude. All around stretched fields far and wide fields without end. Not even a woods was visible on the horizon. (89-90)

The vastness of the space, with no point upon which to affix one’s gaze, mirrors Arina

Petrovna’s mental decline and her inability to fasten her thoughts “on anything for any significant amount of time” (90). She looks at the endless horizon “until a senile drowsiness began to hum in her ears once again and enveloped in a mist” the monotonous world around her (90). When the day comes that Arina Petrovna finds she “simply could not rise” from her bed, it is clear how wholly she has capitulated because “This circumstance did not even particularly upset her, as though it were in the proper order of

27

things” (128). Her existence comprised of complete idleness until that existence extinguished.

While the boredom that defines the gentrified country life pushes the orphaned twins to escape for the excitement of careers as provincial actresses, Anninka experiences significant tension between hating and desiring the quietly monotonous, idle lifestyle.

When Anninka returns to Golovlyovo to pay her respects at her grandmother’s grave, she immediately and repeatedly reminds her uncle how boring it is there. But she also senses something comforting in the stillness. She thinks,

Had it been so long ago that Pogorelka had seemed so hateful to her—and now suddenly her heart was overfilled with some kind of contagious desire to live awhile in this hateful place. It was quiet here, uncomfortable, unattractive, but quiet, so quiet that it seemed as though everything had died all around. (138)

While Anninka is drawn to the quiet, she also intuitively senses its destructive potential.

But in the end, Anninka’s “weak character” cannot escape the inexorable pull of

Golovlyovo (147). She knows that every death in her family—her twin, her two cousins, her two uncles, her grandmother—originated in that place that is “death itself, malicious, spiritually empty; that was death eternally lying in wait for a new victim” (235). She knows it will take her as well, but she is stuck in a sort of purgatory, unable to accomplish suicide side by side with her sister and then continuing to live with absolutely no purpose. She paces in the darkness of the manor house, “trying to tire herself out and principally, trying not to think about anything” while painful memories of her debauched life and her impoverished upbringing plague her (235). Anninka resorts to vodka to obliterate her memories, which does buy her a few hours of peace every night, but then in the morning, “shattered, half out of her mind, she again would crawl out . . . and begin to

28

live again” (237). She is caught in a torturous cycle of idleness and self-destruction and she does not have the fortitude to extricate herself. Although she still breathes at the conclusion of the novel, her imminent death is implied as she lies “in her bed unconscious, with all the signs of brain fever” (247).

The reader’s initial introduction to the Golovlyov family comes via the decline and death of Stepan Vladimirych, the oldest of Arina Petrovna’s sons. Although intelligent, Stepan is a man who “did not manifest the slightest impulse to work” and did not “have the least inclination to make his own way” (8). Having frittered away the boons provided by his mother, Stepan Vladimirych, like Anninka, finds himself returning to Golovlyovo for lack of any other option. He considers his return to be inevitable: “he knew what awaited him there, and yet all the same he was going and could not prevent himself from doing so. There was no other course open to him. The very least of men could have done something for himself, could have earned his own bread, but he alone could do nothing” (24). In complete submission to his unavoidable fate, Stepan

Vladimirych sees the estate’s white steeple in the distance and realizes he is at last standing “on Golovlyovo soil, that despicable soil which had given despicable birth to him” (25). His first impression is to imagine “his coffin there” in the manor house (25).

“‘Coffin! Coffin! Coffin!’ he repeated unconsciously to himself,” but even that dire premonition does not initiate any incentive to turn away (25). Before long, Stepan is the first Golovlyov to succumb to the mist of oblivion discussed earlier regarding Arina

Petrovna. He returns to Golovlyovo and “The doors of the vault swung open, admitted him, and swung shut. There ensued a series of dreary, monotonous days, one after the other drowning in the gray, yawning abyss of time” (26). Like his niece Anninka, he

29

spends days pacing back and forth, while “The future, hopeless and inescapable, which had once flashed through his mind and filled him with apprehension, became enveloped in mist more and more each day, and finally, ceased to exist entirely” (26). With the arrival of autumn, Stepan Vladimirych feels “the gray, eternally weeping heavens of autumn did oppress him” because “It seemed as though the sky were suspended directly over his head and threatened to drown him” (41). Although he is indoors, he feels trapped rather than protected: “All that remained was to pace back and forth, endlessly back and forth. A sickly weariness paralyzed his mind” (42). With Stepan Vladimirych,

Saltykov introduces the vocabulary of paralysis that becomes thematic to the decline of the owners of Golovlyovo. Stepan feels “through his entire body an inexpressible languor that defied diagnosis,” burdened with “despondency and weariness” against which “he could not struggle” (42). As a precursor to Anninka, Stepan is the first of the

Golovlyovs to turn to drink in an attempt to obliterate his misery. His descent is terrifyingly depicted and culminates with an attempt to escape from Golovlyovo. Of course, he does not succeed, and quickly collapses into “an unrelieved gloom wherein there was no place either for reality or fantasy alike . . . It was as though a black cloud had enveloped him from head to foot, and he was absorbed in it and in it alone” (48).

With that, oblomovshchina instigated and exacerbated by the surroundings of Golovlyovo leads to the first death of the novel.

Pavel Vladimirych, the youngest son, is very similar to his oldest brother. He is

“the utmost personification of a human being lacking any enterprise whatsoever. Even as a child he had not manifested the slightest inclination either for study, games or social intercourse” (11). He grows up to be “a man devoid of all enterprise . . . he was a sullen

30

man, but inactivity was at the root of his sullenness” (12). He blames nature for his misfortunes as a landowner, complaining to his mother that “there had been no rain for weeks on end, then suddenly it was because there was such a downpour it seemed the heavens had caved in; or the beetles had taken over all the trees in the garden and stripped them; then the moles had torn up all the fields” (58). When his mother scolds him, saying “You shouldn’t be sitting there with your arms folded!” his rebuttal indicates his submissive capitulation to circumstances: “And just what would you order me to do?

Send the rain over to Golovlyovo or something? . . . Should I change the climate for you?” (59). Like the superfluous man, Pavel’s thoughts cannot manifest into action, but this is also because, unlike that of the superfluous man, all of Pavel’s mental energy is focused on reliving the past and fantasizing new conclusions to those historic events instead of planning and dreaming for the future. In what is clearly a Golovlyov family trend, and an interesting potential manifestation of oblomovshchina, Pavel also becomes an alcoholic: “This passion had eaten away at him stealthily, thanks to the monotony of life in the country” (58). Once again, the isolation of provincial life, which the landlord exacerbates with so little effort, precipitates a dramatic decline into paranoia and fantastic idleness. “Cut off by himself, Pavel Vladimirych came to loathe the company of living people,” and instead spends his time mired in hateful reminiscences of the past until his death (60).

The third son, Porfiry Vladimirych, the central character of the novel, is

“grotesquely serious and hypocritical,” nicknamed Little Judas and Bloodsucker, with a love for minutiae and useless tabulation and calculation (Proffer qtd. in intro xxx). He is

“a vile person, a liar and idle chatterer” (96). He completes an unremarkable career in the

31

civil service, and seems to be less inclined towards oblomovshchina than his brothers, but closer examination reveals that Porfiry Vladimirych merely disguises his idle preferences more cleverly than the rest of his family. When he takes over Golovlyovo from his mother, he “immediately created for himself a mass of trivia and pettiness which he could fiddle with endlessly” so that he always has the appearance of being busy and productive, while in actuality he accomplishes absolutely nothing (97). After he carefully manipulates his mother out of her position of power and into her grave along with his brothers, his spiral into solitude and uselessness begins in earnest. When he establishes himself in Golovlyovo, he “did not budge from there. He had grown noticeably older, more sluggish and lifeless, but he cheated, lied, and indulged in idle chatter even more than before” (94). Provincial life suits him because “Closing himself up in the country, he immediately felt himself free, for nowhere, in no other sphere whatsoever, could his proclivities have found such scope for themselves as here in the country” (96). In essence, Porfiry Vladimirych’s oblomovshchina tendencies might have remained buried if he had stayed in the city with his government employment, but the gentry lifestyle in the country promptly manifested those traits seen clearly in the rest of his family and frequently among other members of the gentry, as discussed in our opening chapter. He completely cuts himself off—“Every connection with the external world was totally severed”—to bury himself in endless hypothetical calculations about Golovlyovo (97).

When his mother dies, he does

not comprehend that the grave opening up before his eyes was bearing away his final tie with the world of the living, the final being with whom he could share the dust which had filled him to full. And that from this day forth this dust, having no other outlet, would accumulate within him until the point where it would ultimately suffocate him. (130)

32

His beloved trivialities bury him. Like his mother and brothers, he reaches a point where

“every insight into real life” becomes obscured to his mind and he cannot fasten his attention on any single thought (196). He too paces, attempting “to come up with something to concentrate his vacillating mind on, something to distract himself with, and it was all in vain” (196). He is terrified at the thought of having to “take a hand in the organization of life” when he is used to leaving the day-to-day requirements to his servant staff (201). Following in the trajectory of his departed family members, Porfiry

Vladimirych cuts himself off from “real life,” preferring “To see no one and to hear nothing” (202). Porfiry parallels the alcoholic descent of his brothers with an

“intoxication of a different sort—the intoxication of idle thought” (203). The weather aids Porfiry Vladimirych’s worsening condition, like when “The rain, ceaselessly pattering against the windows of his study, induced a drowsiness in him” (206). He is briefly shaken out of his dream world when Anninka returns, but rather than stirring him back to life and action, she acts as a vortex that pulls him into the final downward spiral to death. He trades the “intoxication of idle thought” for the real thing, feeling “at times that there was something missing in his existence; that although idle thought offered a great deal, it was not everything. Specifically, he was lacking something stupefying, penetrating, which ultimately would abolish all awareness of life and once and for all cast him out into the void” (203, 239). Porfiry Vladimirych becomes a “living specter,” trapped in a “stone cell” with “no possibility of a new life” (242). He feels that it is

“torturous to go on living and it was uncalled for . . . But misfortune lay in the fact that death would not come” (243-244). Golovlyovo created him, and Golovlyovo ultimately kills him, both because of the isolation and idleness that the estate fosters, but also

33

literally because of the brutal weather. Porfiry Vladimirych dies when he attempts to go to his mother’s grave in “a wet March snowstorm” with the wind blowing, “sending torrents of wet snow into his eyes,” wearing only his housecoat (247). As a final blunt reminder of the powerful influence of geography, “The frozen body of the master” is found near the road and the story ends (247).

As discussed in the opening chapter, there are many different factors that contribute to oblomovshchina. Saltykov specifically wrote The Golovlylov Family to portray “the disintegration of a family of the Russian provincial gentry . . . which is implicitly the story of the decline of their class” (Ehre 3-4). The emancipation of the serfs and changing cultural traditions all play a role in their demise, but ultimately,

“Confronted by the imperatives of history, they remain essentially passive,” clearly demonstrating the influence of oblomovshchina as a defining character trait (4).

According to Ehre, they are “driven by an inner fatality,” and their “old habits of idleness and dependency persist and make the Golovlyovs incapable of administering the estate to meet new economic conditions, and unfit for any other occupation” (4, 12). Saltykov emphasizes the weight of the “inescapable fatalism” that hangs over the Golovlyovs

(237). Ehre also notes “the fatalistic submissiveness with which the children of

Golovlyovo return to the hated familial nest, like lemmings rushing blindly to their death” (14). The family is characterized by “idleness, unsuitability for any business whatsoever, and hard drinking” (Saltykov 239). Although Arina Petrovna, “like a chance meteor,” briefly breaks the trend, she did “not pass on her qualities to any of the children, but on the contrary, she herself died entangled in triviality, idle chatter, and spiritual emptiness” (239).

34

Many factors contribute to the Golovlyovs’ inevitable fate of self-destruction, and

Saltykov makes it clear that the geography of the world around them is an important one of those factors. Starting from Gogol’s foundation in Dead Souls, Saltykov propels the discussion forward with a fierce portrayal of the connection between geography and oblomovshchina. He highlights both the influence of human geography—the isolation enabled by the dispersed countryside estates—and of natural geography, where the landscape and weather patterns are a convenient scapegoat but also create an environment where oblomovshchina flourishes.

35

Chapter III.

Cement

With Fyodor Gladkov’s novel Cement, our examination of oblomovshchina and geography enters a new century with a dramatically different Russia. Cement is a classic example of Socialist Realism, a movement that served to articulate in literature the ideology of the Communist Party. Although works of Socialist Realism were tools for indoctrination, that was not at the expense of the idea that “literature could play a central role in the formation of the modern subject in relation to social and historical reality”

(Lane 44). As such, in keeping with or despite the government agenda, novels such as

Cement strove to represent reality as much as did Dead Souls and The Golovlyov Family.

With the focus on the new societal structure and importance of industrialization, landscape plays a different role than in the previous novels. Gladkov gives less attention to the relationship between oblomovshchina and geography, instead highlighting oblomovshchina primarily by satirizing the new bureaucracy of Communism and using landscape to emphasize the need for a balance between natural and industrial influences in people’s lives.

Cement takes place in a generic town in an unspecified region of Russia, but the frequent references to the mountains and the nearby sea indicate that it is likely somewhere along the Black Sea coast in the more southern climate of the country. This is therefore the first and only novel of this particular study that does not focus on the dominant feature of Russian geography: the vast, central steppe. Instead, “to the right

and left, are the huge mountains; over there, the sea, blue as the sky, rimless, with a horizon higher than the mountains” (Gladkov 135). The town is surrounded by wild forest and mountains with “cliffs and steep, brown slopes to the sky” that provide visual boundaries, framing the landscape in a way that is not possible on the open plains (123).

However, like the preceding authors, Gladkov still presents the novel’s geography on a grand, often overwhelming, scale. For example, “the sea and sky were fused into one aerial ocean,” an image of infinity that mirrors the vast openness highlighted by both

Gogol and Saltykov (231). Also in keeping with his predecessors, Gladkov highlights that this immensity is a key component of Russia’s unique identity: “All this, the mountains, the sea, the factory, the town and the boundless distances beyond the horizon—the whole of Russia, we ourselves” (34). Like Gogol but with the distinct overtones of Communist inculcation, Gladkov seeks to emphasize how the geography hints at the tremendous untapped potential of Russia:

All this immensity—the mountains, the factory, the distances—all were singing in their depths the song of our mighty labor. Do not our hands tremble at the thought of our back-breaking task, a task for giants? . . . This is Workers’ Russia; this is us; the new world of which mankind has dreamed throughout the centuries. (34)

Gladkov, however, can envision the timeline for that mysterious potential to become a concrete reality because it has already begun with the spreading of socialist ideology across the country. For Gladkov’s characters, the timeline projects forward no more than a couple decades as opposed to the unspecified future of the earlier authors.

Perhaps because the geography of Cement has distinctive features upon which the eye can focus and that provide perspective, or because the novel takes place in as friendly a climate as Russia has to offer, most of Gladkov’s descriptions of the landscape lack the

37

unfavorable tones common of other Russian authors. In the opening sentences of the novel, he describes how “the sea foamed like boiling milk in the flashing sunlight” and

“the air, between the mountains and the sea, was fiery and lustrous as wine” (1).

Gladkov’s descriptions frequently appeal to at least two, if not more, of the senses, detailing scents and sounds and even flavors. Gleb Chumalov, one of the protagonists, walks through “the wine-gold lustre . . . among the sparkling yellow flowers. It seemed to him as though the very air sang and chirruped and danced on wings of mother-of- pearl” (2). As the season progresses, “White, woolly balls of cloud were rolling in the blue sky; and on the green slopes of the mountains the first spring flowers sparkled in swarms. In an opal mist, the bushes blazed among the stones and in the fissures” (133).

Later in the year, “It was October, but still warm; and in the warmth and the dark there were already the odours of autumn decay, of fermenting mould and fallen leaves” (278).

One of the longest passages devoted to the novel’s natural settings takes place during winter:

It was cold. The north-east wind was blowing from the mountains and the air between them and the sea was extremely clear, saturated with the blue of the sky and with the sun. Over the bay enormous ragged clouds floated as though projected from unseen craters. . . Beyond the town, on the slopes, the autumn mist was condensing in the cold, and the crests of the ridge were veiled with mists that rose from the wooded gorges and rocky gullies. Fiery patches blazed on the mountain, floating over the slopes and arêtes, vanishing as they reached the gullies and lighting up again on the chalk cliffs. Here, between the mountains and the town, above the bay, was a clear burning blue, and the mountains looked like crystal . . . Dazzling thick, white snow-drifts of cloud rolled over the defiles surging round the peaks and melting under the sun in the gullies and quarries. The stormy sea was smoking white, like a whirling snow-storm, a mass of dense foam. Between the breakwater and the quays, near the docks, rainbow colours flashed in the air. Against the concrete walls of the docks the waves were flinging up masses of spray, whipping with grey spume the buildings which lay drowned in the russet haze of autumn. (299-300)

38

Gladkov presents winter neutrally; it is neither an otherworldly, matchless seasonal experience nor an awesome, insurmountable burden on life.

There are a few exceptions where Gladkov does reveal a distinctly critical tone against the weather. In one spring scene, “the sun was not burning; the sky was white- clouded. There was not enough air for one’s lungs; and the town and mountains, the people and the docks, were all whipped by the wind which went rocking in whirlwinds of pebbles” (113). Gladkov’s harshest condemnation also encompasses the sole example where he directly ties oblomovshchina to the geography, and it’s a scorching summer scene. Gladkov appeals to all the senses, detailing the bronze sky, blazing “whirling waves of heat” rising “like steam above the mountains,” “the burning air,” how “a dry warm wind burned one’s face,” “The acacia leaves smelt as though they were burning,” and “one’s mouth was dry” from the heat (231). He notes that “The people were suffocating under this sun” and “fleeing from this infernal furnace” (231). His description brings to mind Saltykov’s portrayal of that hot summer day in Dubrovina from The Golovlyov Family. Like Saltykov, Gladkov blames the oppressive weather as the reason why “all active life had stopped; and there was only emptiness and indolence”

(231). Gladkov resorts to geography accusation far less frequently than Gogol and

Saltykov, but he too acknowledges, however briefly, the impact Russia’s extreme weather patterns have on the manifestation of oblomovshchina among the Russian people.

The degree to which the theme of industrialization permeates Cement entails a significant difference in the geographical depictions compared to the previous novels.

The novel is a work of Socialist Realism, so it is not a secret that Gladkov was pushing

39

the Socialist agenda, but he does so discreetly in terms of his descriptions of the novel’s settings. The mountains are repeatedly portrayed in metallurgical terms: “the flanks of the mountain, gleaming like copper,” “heaps of stone and slag seemed to flow like streams of molten metal,” “rushing down in streams of black and bronze,” “the peaks of the ridge were sharply defined in a dazzling line like molten metal,” “The slopes and ribs of the mountain glimmered with iron and sulphur,” and “the mountains echoed with metallic thunder” (1, 123, 152, 179, 231, 311). Several times, Gladkov describes the huge buildings of the factory by comparing them to mountains, and vice versa: “rising like a mountain, the enormous edifice of the power-station” and “the battlements of the mountains were like the black turrets of a gigantic factory” (14, 84). The sea and sky are not spared from this industrialization of their features either. The sea lays “in a phosphorescent shimmer” and sings “in an electric undertone” (30). A sunset is the sky

“slowly dying out like cooling iron” (84). Gladkov’s method does not diminish the representation of nature in the novel in any way, but inconspicuously helps to keep the theme of industrialization and construction in the forefront of the reader’s mind.

The novel centers on industrialization, economic progress, and the Soviet bureaucracy per the requirements of Socialist realism, but many of the characters crave simpler times. When Gleb first returns home from the war and finds the factory crumbling and his old life shattered in the dust, his neighbor Savchuk says, “Brother

Gleb, I’m giving up. There’s nothing but emptiness and the grave. I’m dying from too much strength . . . I’m full of strength, and yet I’m afraid. . . I’m afraid of the gloom and devastation here” (10). Reminiscing about his years working in the factory, which was the only life he knew, “He shed tears at the death of once active labour” (11). Savchuk’s

40

wife Motia also laments, “Oh, how badly we need work! If only there was work already .

. . wouldn’t we have a quieter, healthier life then? When we did have work there were children . . . when the work died, the children too . . .” (71). Motia mourns the loss of her purpose as a mother in the same way Savchuk is adrift without his job in the factory. The chaos caused by total social and economic restructuring induces oblomovshchina in people who were formerly active, productive, and fulfilled. They do not understand the new system or where they fit in it, and so they idly wait, futilely wishing that things could go back to the way they were. Even the factory, with its windows shattered by the winter wind and “bare iron ribs of the concrete foundations” laid open by mountains streams,

“slept in these idle days” (14).

Gleb represents the minority full of vigor and idealized motivation. Gleb rushes

“hither and thither, dripping with sweat,” expending vast amounts of time and energy to achieve small gains towards making the cement factory operational again (115). There is a sense of frenzy and mania in his ceaseless movement, which contrasts sharply with the

Chairmen and other Communist leaders, who “calmly [listen] to the tumult” and “never

[appear] hurried” (91). Gladkov quietly undermines Gleb’s activity by highlighting how the bureaucracy, intentionally or not, forces oblomovshchina upon the average citizen.

Gladkov describes how “Gleb, with his helmet pushed back on his head, was running to the Council of Trade Unions, to the Party Committee . . . to the Railway Men’s Union . . . to the Factory Administration, to the power-house . . .” (113). In one particular sequence,

Gleb tries to get a meeting with the Chairman of the Executive Committee and is directed, per a sign on the office door, to go to the Chairman’s Secretary to receive admission to the Chairman’s office. In the Secretary’s office, there is “stuffiness and

41

confusion and another long queue” of applicants waiting to speak with the Secretary.

Gleb is told, “First get into the queue here, and then you will join the one over there”

(92). Gleb would be consigned to spend his days waiting in queues if he were an average

Soviet citizen. He is not, so he throws himself against the “impassable bulwark of the

Economic Council and the factory administration,” because he knows that “In the administration of the factory there was nothing but waste, inactivity, sabotage” and “In the Economic Council, sabotage, bureaucracy, and some invisible internal activity which one could not fathom” (208). But even his anti-oblomovshchina personality struggles to make progress against the morass of bureaucratic procedures and apathy of his fellow workers. When Gleb travels away for his work, his absence immediately results in a waning of interest in the factory project. Without Gleb’s physical presence, “the work was frequently interrupted, and in the end it stopped altogether. The factory management ceased carrying out the plans which had been approved and stopped the supply of materials” (253). Through Gleb, Gladkov demonstrates how it is not the social movement or national processes that lead to progress, but the energy and hard work of enterprising individual citizens. When Gleb returns from his travels, witnesses the

“emptiness, rubbish and decay,” and goes on an angry rampage to get answers, the system stymies him once again: “We stopped the work because the Economic Council has discovered that it is impossible to continue the repairs for lack of necessary resources and without the sanction of higher economic organs . . . we can’t go beyond the instructions and orders which come from above” (255-256). The system provides a perfect national excuse for oblomovshchina in Soviet society.

42

Their dedication to their cause wrenches most of Gladkov’s characters out from their private homes nestled into the mountainsides to settle in communal dormitories in the main town. Gleb, his wife Dasha, and the others spend their time bustling between meetings, making plans, and working on the factory or in the commandeered buildings in the town that comprise the various Committees and Unions. Dasha even gives their young daughter, Nurka, into the care of one of the communal children’s homes since all things, including raising children, are supposed to be a community effort. However much the characters surround themselves with stone, cement, and walls, Gladkov meaningfully returns them to natural settings to either experience or come to terms with significant life events. When Serge goes to his father’s house, which is being taken over by the

Communists, to bid farewell to his dying mother, he first dallies in the garden outside.

He walks through the orchard, where he remembers his father’s hard work planting the trees that now “shimmered in the sun as though drunken by the sweet exhalations of the spring soil and the bursting buds, and by the dancing almond-blooms” (109). He sees

“the well-known trees and neglected paths and the arbour of lattice-work covered with clusters of wild grapes” (109). His brief sojourn both through his memories and the associated physical space helps brace him for the emotionally difficult meeting with this mother.

In another significant moment, a walk through “a wood of young oaks and witch- elms, whose bluish semi-transparency pulsated with the murmur of spring” provides the setting for Gleb, Dasha, and Polia Mekhova to finally sort out their complex relationship

(150). As he does throughout the novel for key moments, Gladkov carefully details the scene:

43

Already the sun was sinking, fading beyond the distant mountain ridge; and the sky above them was a deep thick blue, except in the opal dimness over the sun, where it was stained with fire. The mountains seemed very near . . . The violet shadows of evening, dim as though strewn with ashes, floated up from the valley along the crater-like gullies. There were still patches and strips on the rocks and slopes which blazed fierily. And here, among the blue cobwebby bushes, in this isolated place with its grass- grown paths, the twilight silence came flooding the land like water. It seemed to flow up out of the earth, out of the wild undergrowth of the rest, and from the ravine where a little brook rustled. The stones in the brook seemed alive like tortoises and the water played there, black, flashing with blue. This valley darkness, charged with the heady fumes of the moist spring earth of the grass, and of unborn leaves in pregnant buds, exhaled the breath of the earthy depths, their tangled roots and airy branches. (152)

Polia chatters, “It’s so long since I’ve been in a wood. It smells of dew and damp earth.

And this bitter-sweet odour, it is the buds and the sap of the trees” (150). Like Serge, the natural setting brings Polia’s childhood memories to the front of her mind, and she comments, “. . . these little oaks and this spring-time smell seem to stir me” (150). The soothing effect of the blooming springtime forest enables a moment of introspection that breaks down some of the unspoken barriers between the three characters. Polia points out, “. . . as human beings we are apart, strangers to each other . . . If we just dare to touch each other, quite simply, like human beings, we become panic-stricken and retire into ourselves . . . We are always under lock and key; in the daytime we lock up our feelings, and at night our rooms” (153). Through their conversation, Polia reveals her loneliness, Gleb is able to acknowledge the bond growing between them, and Dasha tacitly gives her blessing for that bond to develop. It’s an exchange that cannot happen in the dormitory, or the factory, or any of the town buildings hosting committees and councils, so Gladkov takes them to the natural landscape where they can be less guarded and accomplish an important development of their characters. This scene opens the way for another critical moment: full reconciliation between Dasha and Gleb.

44

Up until this moment, Gleb had been forcefully pressing Dasha for details about what happened to her while he was way fighting the war for three years. He wanted his demure little housewife back instead of the independent Communist leader that he discovered when he came home. Gleb, again reflecting Gladkov’s theme that the most important moments must occur in the embrace of nature rather than man-made construction, suggests to Dasha, “Let’s take a walk up the mountain and sit down and breathe for a while” (154). They sit above the reservoir where “the water was playing, singing like crickets; surging and humming . . . it seemed that something living and immense was sighing in the void. And it seemed that this great sigh and the twanging of chords were floating in the forest and over the forest, streaming from the purple twilight of the lowlands” (156). At last, Gleb is able to accept that the old Dasha is gone and with genuine curiosity he requests, “Here on the mountain under the sky it is sweet to lie like this, my head in your lap, Dasha. We have never been such dear friends as in this evening hour. Tell me how you managed to get on while I was away and all the adventures you had” (157). Gladkov is not particularly discreet with this crucial moment, highlighting:

Everything was airy, profound and immeasurable. The mountains were no longer ridges and hollows of stone and rock, but thick sooty smoke; and the sea in its shoreless flooding was no longer a sea but a blue abyss. And this man and woman . . . on a fragment of the planet, flew—above the abyss and yet under the abyss—far away, without knowing it, on a flight into infinity. (156)

Gleb takes the important step of understanding the changed role of women, and his wife in particular, in the new Soviet society, which enables them to grow closer again to support each other in working towards their individual and mutual goals.

45

The novel’s landscape plays an important role in significant moments for Dasha especially. Prior to the important scene above, Dasha is captured by Cossacks and nearly killed. In the midst of this terrifying situation, Dasha finds “her mind was empty—no thought, no pity and no fear for herself” because instead, she is focusing on what she experiences around her. She notices a “lonely pine-tree on the cliff” and wonders “Why did she see for the first time this dense vapour over the mountain slopes, purple in hue?”

(127). When the Cossacks lead her to a suitable place for her hanging, the natural world around her completely consumes her awareness, touching each of her senses:

That pine-tree on the mountains in the opaque fiery air. Oh, how high! There was a sweet intoxicating smell of spring; the young leaves were uncurling and changing their colours like glow-worms into rainbow hues. The brook played with the stones as though they were rattles . . . Dasha’s mind was so clear, although without thoughts instead, purple, shimmering air. Everything was so clear, transparent and winged . . . How sweet was the spring air? The pine-tree in flight leaned over the precipice, stretching its wings. Oh, how high! (128)

Ultimately the Cossacks decide to let her go instead of hanging her. As she makes her way out of the valley alone, “She remembered only one thing, bright and joyful: little grey-tufted birds flew away and then returned again. They twittered as she passed, flew away and back again” (129).

In this scene, while the landscape around her plays a key role in sustaining her through the event, it contradictorily contributes to her fear as well. In Gladkov’s Russia, nature can be beautiful, but it can also be imperious and powerful. Just before the

Cossack attack, Dasha notices, “The mountains rose with cliffs and steep, brown slopes to the sky . . . Down below the hovering misty darkness quivered over the woods and thickets . . . The wood down below seemed to have been hurled from the steps: impassable . . . rustling with dim foreboding” (123). In part, the menacing element in the

46

landscape comes from the unknown human threat concealed within those forests and crags rather than the natural features themselves. The woods, “entangled with lianas, with ferns and bushes growing among the crags” are “a wild place,” with a “dread speaking stillness” caused by knowledge of the “other twilight ravines” where “bandits’ lairs were concealed” (123). But the other half of the sense of threat comes from the vastness of the landscape and how it makes Dasha feel like “a grain of invisible dust”

(129). Throughout Cement, the landscape features typically provide perspective and a sense of boundary that contrasts with the forbidding, open steppes of the previous two novels. This scene marks the one exception as Gladkov presents a situation where a character’s smallness and insignificance are dwarfed by the magnitude of the surrounding geography. Dasha notes the “blind intangible emptiness” of the distant slopes, and how she is “alone among these hills and bare misty distances” (129). For a brief moment, oblomovshchina overwhelms her, and she “became helpless, lonely, condemned, abandoned to this limitless solitude” (129).

Gladkov moves on quickly from his nod to the relationship between geography and oblomovshchina and he returns Dasha to a mindset where she takes strength and calm from nature. Just before her companions return to find her, when her panic is rising at her forced solitude and vague dread that the Cossacks will return, she notices that “The roadside grass was decked with little yellow dandelions—very young flowers and so little, reminding one of chicks just hatched. They seemed to be running to Dasha’s feet”

(130). She sits, “calm and silent,” gazing “at the dandelions, thinking of nothing in particular, listening to the silence of the earth” (130). She becomes aware of the small details: “She could not tell whether it was the stillness twanging in her ears like a taut

47

string, or whether it was a lark singing. She looked at the transparent feathery clouds.

Chords vibrated far away. This was perhaps the clouds singing or the golden dandelions laughing” (130). Her fears are soothed when she allows herself to tune in to the landscape.

Towards the end of the novel, Dasha again, perhaps subconsciously, seeks out the comfort of the natural world when she realizes that her little daughter Nurka is wasting away in the children’s home and that death is inevitable. When Dasha leaves the

Children’s Home, she does “not go as usual down the high road to the Women’s

Section,” but instead walks “into a thicket where she flung herself down on the grass.

And here, in this lonely and unobserved corner, smelling of earth and vegetation, while the sun showered tiny flecks of light through the foliage, she lay crying for a long time, digging with her fingers into the mould” (246). As with previous examples, the forest affords a privacy that is impossible to obtain in town. The smells and textures of the woods embrace to Dasha in her anguish and offer a comfort that cement, steel, and stone are not capable of providing.

Gladkov’s main purpose with geography is his novel is to emphasize its importance in people’s lives, and how a connection to it does not undermine the economic goals of Socialism. There are some moments where oblomovshchina is part of the discussion, but less significantly than in the previous novels. This in part reflects

Socialist ideology and the belief that Russia was at last achieving its long dormant potential with the new system. There was less of Gogol’s despair about what ‘could be’ because it finally ‘was’! But there are, naturally, repercussions for the grand industrial

48

achievements and how they change the land and the people. This is a key feature of

Rasputin’s Farewell to Matyora, the final novel of this study.

49

Chapter IV.

Farewell to Matyora

Valentin Rasputin incorporates into his writing what Walsh calls the “shaman’s view of the world” where “objects of nature are active participants in an all- encompassing and panvitalistic world of spirits” (78). In Rasputin’s entire body of work,

Farewell to Matyora most clearly demonstrates this viewpoint. The namesake island is much more than simply the setting of the novel—Matyora is the most significant character in the story, “living out its last years,” suffering and remembering along with its broken-hearted old villagers who are being forced to relocate (5). The island is a mother figure with whom the human residents feel an incredibly powerful connection. In fact, the name of the island “has multiple etymological associations in Russian, all of them related to the word for ‘mother’” (Parthe qtd. in intro xv). The old people spent their whole lives on the island, and feel its influence through every fiber of their being. When

Darya goes to the desecrated cemetery on the island, she speaks not just to her parents in their graves, but to her beloved land that will soon be drowned, when she desperately asks “. . . what’s to become of me? I’m yours, I belong with you, I should be with you . .

.” (178). She comments, “’It’s pulling me, the ground” (179). In a different conversation, she also says, “you can see Matyora in a woman’s blood” (35). Matyora is more than just the place where she was born and raised, it is a member of her family.

Darya tells her grandson Andrei, “. . . we were given Matyora only to take care of . . .” as a community does for one of their own who is in need, and grown children do for aging

parents (120). Before Grandpa Egor is taken away by boat to the new settlement, where people displaced by the imminent flood are given apartments, he “faced the shore and bowed from the waist three times—right, left, and straight ahead—to Matyora,” politely bidding farewell to his dear family member before leaving forever (68). Rasputin makes his point clear not only with how the human characters speak of and relate to Matyora, but through the narrative descriptions as well. He animates the island, describing how

“the island lay quietly and peacefully,” and towards the end, “miserable Matyora” is now

“naked, disfigured” and alone, “abandoned by absolutely everyone . . . keeping watch . .

.” (37, 181, 189, 181).

There are two other natural objects besides the island itself that are of such significance to the story and to the identity of the island dwellers that they achieve character status as well. The first is the river, “Our Angara” to the villagers (37). It is described using terms that invoke joy, playfulness, and happiness, such as “the Angara rolled over the rocks with such a clear, merry ring” (9). Like Matyora, the Angara is given life in the narrator’s descriptions: “The Angara played . . . and it was as though the

Angara was flying through the air” (67). When the first house burns in the village, the flames illuminate the river, and “where it was lit up, it gaped like an exposed wound of pulsating flesh” (74). The river embraces the island with the “broad right sleeve . . . sticking out at the bend” and “the left sleeve, calmer and closer,” literally wrapping two arms around it to gently hold it and the village and the villagers in their simple life (37).

Darya says, “the Angara was like home to us, we grew up on it” (35). Not only is the island part of their lifeblood, but the villagers also define themselves by the river, especially when they are forced away from it. When Nastasya returns to visit Matyora

51

weeks after she and Egor left for the settlement, she describes others among the displaced as “our own people, we drank water from the same Angara” (202). She explains how

“the others, who aren’t from the Angara” refer to the transplanted river folk as “all drowned” (201). The villagers’ bond with the river is so powerful that not only is it crucial to their own identity, but it provides a defining point for outsiders as well.

The third major landscape character is the “the tsar of trees,” a tremendous, indestructible “centuries-old larch, with mighty branches that stuck straight out, and a crown that had been lopped off by a storm” (37-38). For the villagers, Matyora “was impossible to imagine without that larch in the pasture” (182). The tree had lived for so long that the people of Matyora believed superstitiously that “it was the tsar larch that held the island firm to the river’s bottom, to solid ground, and that as long as it stood so would Matyora” (183). At some time in their not-so-distant history, the people put food offerings at the base of the tree on important holidays because “they felt that if they didn’t leave the offerings the larch would be offended” (183). The tree inspired “respect and fear” among the residents of Matyora because of the significant role it occupied in the island’s history (183). Through its years of life on the island, the tsar larch witnessed deaths from its own branches, survived a tremendous storm that ripped away the top of the tree so that it “squatted and seemed weaker, but it didn’t lose its powerful, majestic appearance,” and tolerated rubbing from cows and buffets from the wind. In the end, the imperious tree was the only thing able to completely flummox the axes, chain saws, and fire of the arsonists tasked with clearing the island in preparation for the flood.

Matyora’s forest, meadows, and village were reduced to ashes, but “The sole survivor, the insubordinate tsar larch, continued to rule over everything around it” (189). The tsar

52

larch portends what will happen to Egor when he leaves the island, as Nastasya exclaims,

“I’ll die of sadness in one week living there . . . How can you transplant an old tree?”

(11). As Egor’s death and the tsar larch’s stubborn refusal to be removed attest, the answer is that you cannot.

On Matyora, the people set the rhythm of their lives by what the island and the river and the weather tell them to do. Gogol introduced the same mindset through the landowner Skudronzhoglo. It is a cycle that does not necessarily carry the more negative implications of oblomovshchina—it is just the way. The novel opens with a passage that introduce readers immediately to the patterns of the land that drive everything:

Once more spring had come, one more in the never-ending cycle, but for Matyora this spring would be the last . . . Once more, rumbling passionately, the ice broke, piling up mounds on the banks, and the liberated Angara River opened up, stretching out in a mighty, sparkling flow. Once more the water gushed boisterously at the island’s upper tip, before cascading down both channels of the riverbed; once more greenery flared on the ground and in the trees, the first rains soaked the earth, the swifts and swallows flew back, and at dusk in the bogs the awakened frogs croaked their love of life. It all had happened many times before, and many times Matyora had been caught up in nature’s changes, neither falling behind nor running ahead of each day. (1)

Following in line with these changes in the weather, the villagers undertake their role:

“And so this year too, the people planted their gardens . . . As usual, they planted wheat .

. . And they sowed the potatoes and carrots . . .” (2). These activities come naturally without requiring serious thought as to when is the right time; the old folk are so in tune with their island that they instinctively know. Rasputin almost quotes Skudronzhoglo’s conversation with Tchitchikov in Dead Souls when he describes how the island’s villagers do “the day’s work every day as it came along,” whether that was “the mowing, then the haymaking” or fishing, whitewashing the houses, or picking berries (61). The

53

narrator comments, “. . . it turned out that they had lived this way for many years and didn’t even know that it was the life” (61). Even respite from the daily chores comes from what the weather presents rather than a deliberate decision by the villagers. For example, summer rain postpones the hay cutting, but the villagers say, “The rain was handy: they could sit and chat without rushing; they didn’t dare take a break on their own, so God sent one along for them” (103).

Eventually, however, endless rain provokes a reaction in keeping with that described previously by Huntington, Pares, and the authors of the previous three novels, and that is the descent of boredom upon the people forced into inaction by the weather.

The narrator describes the “days unsuited for work” and how they resulted in “boredom and lack of something to do” among the villagers, who could really only gather together to drink tea from the samovar and talk about their beloved past and uncertain futures

(114). They are forced into that idleness that defines oblomovshchina by the natural world in which they live. Even when they begin to feel restless and would prefer to leave the cozy gathering in someone’s house, the downpour acts as jailor: “Vera had tried to get up and go home several times, not even home but to work . . . [but] the rain had gotten worse and sounded like a tidal wave” and “[Klavka] would have run off long ago, but the rain kept her put” (117). Rasputin describes the rain falling “out of meanness and spite, so as not to give people hope that it would every finally clear up,” which prompts the villagers to frustration and anger and they “cursed the sky and themselves for living under it” (125). They share the sense of oppression described by Stepan Vladimirych in

The Golovlyov Family. At long last when the weather finally clears and the flooding subsides, the people are able to carry on with their tasks, but the disruption caused by the

54

monsoon “had washed away the passion and broken the stride” of their activities “(37).

Rasputin does not assign blame to the negative impact the weather has on the necessary harvest activities, which is different from the tone used by Saltykov. It is simply the way things are, although that acceptance speaks to oblomovshchina as much as does the characters’ rain-induced inertia.

Farewell to Matyora portrays the closeness to the natural world as a foundational aspect of older, simpler times, the loss of which is detrimental to the generations that follow. As we have already seen in the character of Darya, her sense of self is inseparably woven with the river and the island. It is the generation after hers, represented in the novel by her son Pavel and Katerina’s son Petrukha, that feel they are losing the way. These grown children spent most of their lives on Matyora, but answered the call of industrialization when they grew up, and struggle to embrace that ‘progress’ and turn their backs on the old ways. It is in this generation that the inertia and laziness of oblomovshchina make an appearance in Rasputin’s work. Pavel ponders the traumatic changes looming for Matyora and her residents, and he thinks, “And what about the changes? You couldn’t alter them or change them—or get away from them . . . If it had to be, it had to be . . .” (80). He is stuck between the old ways and the new. He believes that “it is impossible to change anything” but is also disturbed by the destruction of an island like Matyora, wondering if it is “too high a price to pay” for so-called progress

(81). Pavel tries to tell himself that he will be okay in the new settlement, even though it is “unfamiliar and uncomfortable,” because there, “everything was done for him” (83).

He no longer has to chop wood for the oven or bring water or keep livestock for milk and eggs and meat because it’s all provided. The residents “can lie around spitting at the

55

ceiling without a worry or care” (83). However, Pavel has a nagging sense that “with all that relief and ease you don’t feel you’re carrying your own weight anymore” (83). His thoughts reflect the statements made by Savchuk and Motia in Cement. Pavel is conflicted as to whether the modern conveniences make life easier in a positive way, or whether the newfound ease causes a loss of identity and a sense of purpose for one’s life.

While the middle generation is caught between the old and new ways, the youth in Farewell to Matyora wholeheartedly embrace industrialization and modernization, which causes friction between them and the old folk. Oblomovshchina does not cleanly fit as a descriptor for the youth because they brim with energy and activity, but their mindset provides an interesting insight into their sense of fatalism, predestination, and the inability to impart change. They are full of excitement about the great industrialization projects that they are creating. Andrei explains, “These are lively times . . . everything is in motion, as they say; I want my work to be visible, for it to stand forever . . .” (106).

He tells Darya, “. . . you have to see everything and go everywhere. What’s the good of it if you spent your whole life here in one place? You can’t give in to fate, you have to rule it” (104). On the one hand, the youth are making changes, dramatic ones, with machinery and construction. But at the same time, Andrei acknowledges (without noticing the discrepancy in his thoughts) that he is simply caught up in the current of the times and incapable of altering the trajectory. Andrei’s generation is the opposite of the superfluous man in that they are all action, but have not stopped to think through the implications of their activities. When he tries to explain to Darya why he is getting a job working on the very project that is causing the destruction of Matyora, Andrei says,

“They’d flood Matyora either way, Granny, with or without me. I have nothing to do

56

with it” (107). The older generations know what the youngest is too inexperienced to understand about life. Pavel thinks, “It doesn’t even occur to them to doubt. They accept whatever’s done” (82). When Andrei informs Darya that “Man is king of nature,” she responds, “Just reign a bit and you’ll be sorry” (120). She is saddened by the way Andrei has left behind his roots on Matyora, how he has discarded faith and spirituality and closeness to the natural world. She tells him, “You can’t get away from the earth . . . you’re all as small as you were before” (105).

Katerina’s son Petrukha, of the same generation as Pavel, portrays the oblomovshchina type most clearly in Farewell to Matyora. His own mother frequently comments, without malice or anger, “He’s worthless, you know” (88). Petrukha is “an awful worker, whatever he undertook failed, he never did anything right” (89). The kolkhoz and sovkhoz leaders bounce him from task to task, trying to find a use for him, but “he was completely spoiled and didn’t want to do any work . . . he was useless everywhere” (89). He burns down the house that his father built, even though it had been marked for relocation to be preserved in a historical museum, because he wants the money, which he promptly spends on alcohol. He abandons his mother on the island and disappears, only returning when he is broke and once again has nowhere else to go—not unlike the sons of The Golovlyov Family, who also return to the historic family home not because they particularly want to, but because they have no other choice. Matyora’s old women complain about Petrukha, but also know that “he was just born that way” (91).

His mother Katerina says, “I see it’s useless. The way he was is the way he is now. All my anger is gone . . . only pity that he’s like that is left” (91). When Petrukha does finally get a paying job, it is for burning down the houses in another village that will be

57

drowned. Darya points out that it is the easiest ‘work’ he could have found: “Just stuff some straw about, strike a match, light your cigarette with the same match, and get warm—what a snap!” (157). Katerina is devastated, but she knows, “. . . there was nothing she could do to teach or correct Petrukha: he always was and would be Petrukha.

It looked like he would be that way to the end of his days, that was his fate” (158-159).

Geography is of central importance in Farewell to Matyora, both as a character in the story and as a critical component of identity for the human characters. Even in the more disruptive moments, such as the never-ending downpours that interrupted the hay cutting, Rasputin emphasizes the characters’ deep ties to nature:

They looked at the rain—how it struck the ground, collecting in puddles in the hard ruts; how it dripped in rushing streams, rather than drops, from the sheds; they listened to the uneven, pattering gurgling, which found resonance as a pleasant and true peace in the soul; and they felt that they could breathe easier and fresher, that the air, renewed by the pure smells of heaven brought down by the water and the rich smells of the earth brought up by the rain, had penetrated the house. (110)

Like Gladkov’s characters, Rasputin’s notice the details. Unlike Gogol and Saltykov,

Rasputin is not particularly negative towards oblomovshchina. Weather may force his characters to idleness, their labor-intensive agricultural life may be difficult, and they may be bowed before the inevitability of fate, but in Rasputin’s view, these are not bad things nor are they good. They just are—and therein lies his subtle truth about oblomovshchina.

58

Conclusion

In a speech delivered in 1818, Nikolai Karamzin “insisted that Russia had a

‘national mind and feeling,’ of which literature was the ‘mirror’” (Maguire 136). Our study spanning approximately two hundred years of Russian literature illustrates the longevity of the discussion about Russian national identity, particularly in terms of oblomovshchina and the significance of natural geography as part of that identity. In the nineteenth century, Gogol and Saltykov present strong negative feelings about the powerful influence of the landscape and weather. Despite Gogol’s complicated opinion of the landscape, which he frequently finds dull and demoralizing but also unique and beautiful, he valiantly seeks to make it a source of national pride. Saltykov unabashedly hates it. Gladkov portrays a landscape of both sweeping grandeur and intricate detail with decidedly less rancor than the previous novels. The emotional scale of the four authors culminates at the opposite end of the spectrum with Rasputin’s loving descriptions of the mother-island Matyora.

The portrayal of oblomovshchina follows a parallel arc of intensity. Both Gogol and Saltykov express frustration towards the laziness and apathy they felt was widespread, especially amongst the Russian gentry. Gogol bemoans the dearth of men with the constitution to prod the unfulfilled mass of Russian people into their potential, and Saltykov does not even consider that such individuals might exist amongst the

Russian people. Gladkov acknowledges oblomovshchina, but counters by repeatedly emphasizing Gleb’s ceaseless energy and initiative. And again continuing the trajectory

59

towards positivity, or at least neutrality, Rasputin too acknowledges that oblomovshchina is still around, but chooses not to make it a focal point of his novel.

There is noticeable change to the strength of the relationship between geography and oblomovshchina from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century novels that corresponds to the advent of industrialization across Russia. In the older novels, Gogol and Saltykov identify a very clear link between the natural landscape and oblomovshchina, which is reasonable in a society that almost universally relied on agriculture to survive. One can sympathize with succumbing to a hopeless fatalism in the face of the never-ending struggle to carve life out of the snow and mud and vast openness and the subjugation to the unpredictable whims of uncontrollable natural forces. As the agricultural society shifted towards urbanization and industrialization, people found respite from the overwhelming influence of Russia’s geography. Oblomovshchina persisted, but for different reasons, which Gladkov presents in the characters left befuddled and adrift by the swift changes of Communism and Rasputin explores through the middle generations’ sense of rootlessness and uselessness.

From Dead Souls through The Golovlyov Family and Cement to Farewell to

Matyora, an unambiguous spectrum appears with negativity, frustration, and despair exhibited by the authors on one end and neutrality or even hope and positivity displayed by the authors moving towards the other end. Correspondingly, the connection between geography and oblomovshchina weakens. It is clear that, even after two hundred years,

Russian literary voices remain interested in their national identity and the characteristic of oblomovshchina, and their national geography continues to be an important feature of identity as well. But perhaps the softening of tone, easing of negative perspective, and

60

increased ability to portray beauty and hope indicate that they are at last coming to terms with some of the exceptional things that make them Russian.

61

Bibliography

I. Works Cited Adams, Robert Martin. Nil: Episodes in the Literary Conquest of Void During the Nineteenth Century. Oxford University Press, 1966. Baring, Maurice. Landmarks in Russian Literature. Methuen and Co. Ltd., 1910. Ehre, Milton. “A Classic of Russian Realism: Form and Meaning in ‘The Golovlyovs.’” Studies in the Novel, vol. 9, no. 1, 1977, pp. 3-16. Ely, Christopher. This Meager Nature: Landscape and National Identity in Imperial Russia. Northern Illinois University Press, 2002. Fedotov, G. P. “The Russian.” The Russian Review, vol. 13, no. 1, 1954, pp. 3-17. Figes, Orlando. Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia. Picador, 2002. Foote, I.P. “M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin: The Golovlyov Family.” Forum for Modern Language Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, 1968, pp. 53-63. Gifford, Henry. The Novel in Russia: From Pushkin to Pasternak. Harper and Row, 1964. Gillespie, Alyssa Dinega, editor. Russian Literature in the Age of Realism: Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 277. Gale, 2003. Harjan, George. “Dobroliubov’s ‘What is Oblomovism?’: An Interpretation. Canadian Slavonic Papers, vol. 18, no. 3, 1976, pp. 284-292. Huntington, Ellsworth. “Russia’s Worst Enemy.” New Outlook, 1933, pp. 36 – 39. ---. “The Geography of Human Productivity.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 33, no. 1, 1943, pp. 1-31. Johnston, Charles. “The Russian’s Immense Inertia.” The North American Review, vol. 206, no. 744, 1917, pp. 726-733. Kropotkin, Petr Alekseevich. Ideals and Realities in Russian Literature. A. A. Knopf, 1919. Lane, Tora. “The School of Socialist Realist Education: The Case of Fedor Gladkov.” Scando-Slavica, vol. 63, no. 1, 2017, pp. 43-59. Lindstrom, Thais. A Concise History of Russian Literature. New York University Press, 1966. Magarshack, David. Gogol: A Life. Grove Press Inc., 1957. Maguire, Robert A. Exploring Gogol. Stanford University Press, 1994.

Matlaw, Ralph E, editor. Belinsky, Chernyshevsky, and Dobrolyubov: Selected Criticism. Indiana University Press, 1962. Nabokov, Vladimir. Lectures on Russian Literature. Edited by Fredson Bowers, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981. Nivat, Georges. “The Russian Landscape as Myth.” Russian Studies in Literature, vol. 39, no. 2, 2003, pp. 51-70. Olgin, Moissaye. A Guide to Russian Literature 1820-1917. Russell and Russell, 1971. Pares, Bernard. A History of Russia. J and J Gray, 1949. Ragsdale, Hugh. The Russian Tragedy: The Burden of History. M.E. Sharpe, 1996. Rancour-Laferriere, Daniel. The Slave Soul of Russia: Moral Masochism and the Cult of Suffering. New York University Press, 1995. Realo, Anu, et al. “Mechanisms of the National Character Stereotype: How People in Six Neighboring Countries of Russia Describe Themselves and the Typical Russian.” European Journal of Personality, vol. 23, 2009, pp. 229-249. Slonim, Marc. The Epic of Russian Literature: From Its Origins Through Tolstoy. Oxford University Press, 1969. Thomas, Franklin. The Environmental Basis of Society. The Century Co., 1925. Todd, Williams Mills III, editor. Literature and Society in Imperial Russia, 1800-1911. Stanford University Press, 1978. Walsh, Harry. “Shamanism and Animistic Personification in the Writing of Valentin Rasputin.” South Central Review, vol. 10, no. 1, 1993, pp. 78-90.

II. Novels Cited: Gladkov, Fyodor Vasilievich. Cement [1925]. Translated by A.S. Arthur and C. Ashleigh, Northwestern University Press, 1994. Gogol, Nikolai. Dead Souls [1842]. Translated by Constance Garnett, Barnes and Noble Classics, 2005. Rasputin, Valentin. Farewell to Matyora [1976]. Translated by Antonina W. Bouis, Northwestern University Press, 1979. Saltykov, Mikhail. The Golovlyov Family [1880]. Translated by Samuel D. Cioran, Ardis, 1977

III. Works Consulted: Agadjanian, Alexander. “Revising Pandora’s Gifts: Religious and National Identity in the Post-Soviet Social Fabric.” Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 53, no. 3, 2001, pp. 473-488.

63

Baring, Maurice. An Outline of Russian Literature. Hemy Holt and Company, 1915. Bassin, Mark. “Geographical Determinism in Fin-de-siècle Marxism: Georgii Plekhanov and the Environmental Basis of Russian History.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 82, no. 1, 1992, pp. 3-22. ---. “Inventing Siberia: Visions of the Russian East in the Early Nineteenth Century.” American Historical Review, vol. 96, no. 3, 1991, pp. 763-794. ---. “Nurture Is Nature: Lev Gumilev and the Ecology of Ethnicity.” Slavic Review, vol. 68, no. 4, 2009, pp. 872-897. ---. “Turner, Solov’ev, and the “Frontier Hypothesis”: The Nationalist Signification of Open Spaces.” Journal of Modern History, vol. 65, no. 9, 1993, pp. 473-511. Bercoff, Giovanna Brogi. “Rus’, Russia and National Identity: Another Voice.” Canadian Slavonic Papers, vol. 48, no. 3/4, 2006, pp. 355-361. Borowec, Christine. “Time After Time: The Temporal Ideology of Oblomov.” The Slavic and East European Journal, vol. 38, no. 4, pp. 561-573. Boyd, Alexander F. Aspects of the Russian Novel. Rowman and Littlefield, 1972. Brandenberger, David. “DEBATE: Stalin’s Populism and the accidental creation of Russian national identity.” Nationalities Papers, vol. 38, no. 5, 2010, pp. 723-739. Broek, Jan O.M. Compass of Geography. Charles E. Merrill Books Inc., 1966. ---. “National Character in the Perspective of Cultural Geography.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 370, 1967, pp. 8-15. Bruno, Andy. “Russian Environmental History: Directions and Potentials.” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, vol. 8, no. 3, 2007, pp. 635-650. Busch, Robert L. “Gladkov’s Cement: The Making of a Soviet Classic.” The Slavic and East European Journal, vol. 22, no. 3, 1978, pp. 348-361. Campbell, Robert D. “Personality as an Element of Regional Geography.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 58, no. 4, 1968, pp. 748-759. Chekhov, Anton. Sakhalin Island. Translated by Brian Reeve, Alma Classics, 2013. Diment, Galya. “Valentin Rasputin and Siberian Nationalism.” World Literature Today, vol. 67, no. 1, 1993, pp. 69-73. Evans, Alfred B. Jr. “Putin’s Legacy and Russia’s Identity.” Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 60, no. 6, 2008, pp. 899-912. Fekadu, K. “The Paradox in Environmental Determinism and Possibilism: A Literature Review.” Journal of Geography and Regional Planning, vol. 7, no. 7, 2014, pp. 139-139. Franklin, Simo and Emma Widdis, editors. National Identity in Russian Culture. Cambridge University Press, 2004.

64

Gillespie, David C. Valentin Rasputin and Soviet Russian Village Prose. The Modern Humanities Research Association, 1986. Golstein, Vladimir. “Landowners in Dead Souls: Or the Tale of how Gogol Blessed What He Wanted to Curse.” The Slavic and East European Journal, vol. 41, no. 2, 1997, pp. 243-257. Gorer, Geoffrey and John Rickman. The People of Great Russia: A Psychological Study. W.W. Norton and Co Inc., 1962. Gritsai, Olga. “Russian human geography in the ‘wonderland’ of globalization.” GeoJournal, vol. 45, no. 1/2, 1998, pp. 77-83. Halperin, Charles J. “Rus’, Russia and National Identity.” Canadian Slavonic Papers, vol. 48, no. 1/2. 2006, pp. 157-166. Huntington, Ellsworth. “The Suicide of Russia.” Scribners Magazine, vol. 77, 1925, pp. 156-160. Ilnytzkyi, Oleh S. “Reply to Charles J. Halperin (“Rus’, Russia and National Identity”).” Canadian Slavonic Papers, vol. 48, no. 1/2, 2006, pp. 161-171. Ioffe, Grigory and Tatyana Nefedova. “Persistent features of the Russian countryside: communal attachment and reform.” GeoJournal, vol. 41, no. 3, 1997, pp. 193-204. Kaminer, Jenny. “A Mother’s Land: Arina Petrovna Golovlyova and the Economic Restructuring of the Golovlyov Family.” The Slavic and East European Journal, vol. 53, no. 4, 2009, pp. 545-565. Kelly, Michael R. “Navigating A Landscape of Dead Souls: Gogol and the Odyssean Road.” New Zealand Slavonic Journal, vol. 39, 2005, pp. 37-61. Kleespies, Ingrid. A Nation Astray: Nomadism and National Identity in Russian Literature. Northern Illinois University Press, 2012. Konovalov, S. and D.J. Richards, editors. Russian Critical Essays: XIXth Century. Clarendon Press, 1972. Kuzmin, A.G. “The Sources of the Russian National Character.” Russian Studies in History, vol. 37, no. 2, 1998, pp. 36-52. Lewthwaite, Gordon R. “Environmentalism and Determinism: A Search for Clarification.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 56 no. 1, 1966, pp. 1-23. Love, Katharina Hansen. The Evolution of Space in Russian Literature: A Spatial Reading of 19th and 20th Century Narrative Literature. Rodopi, 1994. ---. “The Structure of Space in I.A. Goncarov’s Oblomov.” Russia Literature, vol. 28, 1990, pp. 175-210. Luks, Leonid. “DEBATE: Was the emergence of Russian national identity merely a historical accident?” Nationalities Papers, vol. 39, no. 1, 2011, pp. 135-140.

65

Lutz, John. “Chichikov’s Chest: Reality, Representation, and Infectious Storytelling in Dead Souls.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 43, no. 4, 2001, pp. 365- 388. Markowtiz, Fran. “Not Nationalists: Russian Teenagers’ Soulful A-Politics.” Europe- Asia Studies, vol. 51, no. 7, 1999, pp. 1183-1198. Marsh, Cynthia. “Lermontov and the Romantic Tradition: The Function of Landscape in A Hero of Our Time.” Slavonic and East European Review, vol. 66, no. 1, 1988, pp. 35- 46. Milov, L.V. “Natural and Climatic Factors and Peculiarities of the Russian Historical Process.” Historical Social Research, vol. 16, no. 2, 1991, pp. 40-59. Muchnic, Helen. An Introduction to Russian Literature. Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1947. Parthe, Kathleen. “Images of Rural Transformation in Russian Village Prose.” Studies in Comparative Communism, vol. 23, no. 2, 1990, pp. 161-175. Pesmen, Dale. Russia and Soul: An Exploration. Cornell University Press, 2000. Peterson, Dale E. “Samovar Life: Russian Nurture and Russian Nature in the Rural Prose of Valentin Rasputin.” The Russian Review, vol. 53, no. 1, 1994, pp. 81-96. Polowy, Teresa. The Novellas of Valentin Rasputin: Genre, Language, and Style. Peter Lang Publishing, 1989. Porus, Vladimir N. “A Superfluous Man.” Russian Studies in Philosophy, vol. 54, no. 2, 2016, pp.113-128. Raskin, D.I. “Russian Nationalism and Issues of Cultural and Civilizational Identity.” Russian Politics and Law, vol. 46, no. 6, 2008, pp. 28-40. Reeve, F. D. The Russian Novel. McGraw Hill Book Company, 1966. Robson, David. “How East and West Think in Profoundly Different Ways.” BBC, 18 January 2017, www.bbc.com/future/story/20170118-how-east-and-west-think-in- profoundly-different-ways. Segel, Harold B, editor and translator. The Literature of Eighteenth-Century Russia, Vol 1. E.P. Dutton and Co, Inc., 1967. Shtilmark, F. R. “The Evolution of Concepts about the Preservation of Nature in Soviet Literature.” Journal of the History of Biology, vol. 25, no. 3, 1992, pp. 429-447. Sokolsky, Anatole A. Russian Literature: XI-XX Centuries. Spain, 1970. Spieker, Sven, editor. Gogol: Exploring Absence. Slavica Publishers, 1999. Stepanova, Elena. “‘The Spiritual and Moral Foundation of Civilization in Every Nation for Thousands of Years’: The Traditional Values Discourse in Russia.” Politics, Religion, and Ideology, vol. 17, nos. 2-3, 2015, pp. 119-136.

66

Stilgoe, John R. What is Landscape? MIT Press, 2015. Stolberg, Eva-Maria. “The Siberian Frontier and Russia’s Position in World History: A Reply to Auste and Nolte.” Review (Fernand Braudel Center), vol. 27, no. 3, 2004, pp. 243-267. Sumner, B.H. A Short History of Russia. Reynal and Hitchcock, 1943. Tiupa, Valerii. “The Mythologeme of Siberia: On the Concept of a Siberian Motif in Russian Literature.” Orbis Litterarum, vol. 61, no. 6, 2006, pp. 443-460. Van Paassen, C. The Classical Tradition of Geography. J.B. Walters, 1957. Veenhoven, Ruut. “Are the Russians as Unhappy as They Say They Are?: Comparability of Self-Reports Across Nations.” Journal of Happiness Studies, vol. 2, 2001, pp. 111- 136. Walicki, Andrzej. “Russian Social Thought: An Introduction to the Intellectual History of Nineteenth-Century Russia.” Russian Review, vol. 36, no. 1, 1977, pp. 1-45. Weiss, Claudia. “Representing the Empire: The Meaning of Siberia for Russian Imperial Identity.” Nationalities Papers, vol. 35, no. 3, 2007, pp. 439-456. Winchell, Margaret. “’Live and Love’: The Spiritual Path of Valentin Rasputin.” The Slavic and East European Journal, vol. 31, no. 4, 1987, pp. 533-547.

IV. Additional Novels Consulted: Chernyshevsky, Nikolai. What Is to Be Done? Translated by Michael R. Katz, Cornell University Press, 1989. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Translated by Constance Garnett, Barnes and Noble Classics, 2004. ---. The House of the Dead and Poor Folk. Translated by Constance Garnett, Barnes and Noble Classics, 2004. Goncharov, Ivan. Oblomov. Translated by David Magarshack, Penguin Books, 1954. Lermontov, Mikhail. A Hero of Our Time. Translated by J.H. Wisdom and Marr Murray, Dover Publications, 2006. Lyeskov, Nikolai. The Enchanted Wanderer. Translated by A.G. Paschkoff, Soho Book Company, 1985. Pasternak, Boris. Doctor Zhivago. Translated by Max Hayward and Manya Harari, Pantheon Books, 1958. Rasputin, Valentin. Live and Remember. Translated by Antonina W. Bouis, Northwestern University Press, 1992.

67

---. Siberia on Fire. Translated by Gerald Mikkelson and Margaret Winchell, Northern Illinois University Press, 1989. Rytkheu, Yuri. A Dream in Polar Fog. Archipelago Books, 2005. Shalamov, Varlam. Kolyma Tales. Translated by John Glad, Penguin Books, 1994. Shukshin, Vasily. Stories from a Siberian Village. Translated by Laura Michael and John Givens, Northern Illinois University Press, 1996. Solzhenitsyn, Alexander. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Translated by Max Hayward and Ronald Hingley, Bantam Books, 1963. Sorokin, Vladimir. The Blizzard. Translated by Jamey Gambrell, Farrar, Strous, and Giroux, 2015. Turgenev, Ivan. Rudin: A Novel. Translated by Constance Garnett, First Rate Publishers, 2014.

68